Novel Nation: Victorian Realism and the Fiction(S) of England

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Novel Nation: Victorian Realism and the Fiction(s) of England

Kirstin Lea Hainer

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

Novel Nation: Victorian Realism and the Fiction(s) of England

Kirstin Lea Hainer

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

2017

Abstract

The idea that the Victorian novel—in particular, the Victorian realist novel—became an integral and transformational part of both individual and national identity in England during the nineteenth century provides the broad framework of my dissertation project. In “Novel Nation:

Victorian Realism and the Fiction(s) of England,” I examine the careers, works, and public reception of four of the most celebrated authors—then and now—from the second half of the nineteenth century: Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

ii influenced their readers, I examine the reciprocal, even porous relationship that existed between the Victorian novel and its readers—a relationship that reveals the seepage between fiction and reality that is at the core of this dissertation project. Thus, while my project examines the specific and varied ways in which these authors and their works imagined, engaged with, and challenged ideas of English national identity and the English nation, it is equally interested in exploring how they and their novels became (willingly or not) symbols and repositories of Englishness—how, that is, they became England’s national culture—and, more broadly, how the English nation became rooted in, realized through, and reimagined by such fictions so that England itself became a “Novel Nation.”

iii Acknowledgments

This dissertation was completed with material support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, and Department of English provided University of Toronto Fellowships.

“Novel Nation” has been a long time in the making and there are numerous people without whom I doubt it would have been made at all and to whom I owe a great deal of thanks.

First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Audrey Jaffe, who always saw the potential in my work and whose warm encouragement, patience, and valuable insights helped me navigate the complexities of Victorian realism and dissertation writing. I could always rely on Audrey for an observation or question that would both clarify and challenge my ideas, helping me to push my project to the next level, and her enthusiasm for my work has helped sustain my own. I cannot imagine a better supervisor; it has been both a privilege and a pleasure to work with her.

I also owe a great deal of thanks to my other committee members, Christine Bolus-Reichert and Jill Matus, who, alongside Audrey, have been part of this project since its inception and have been generous with both their time and insights; I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such vibrant and inspiring group of scholars and for their continued encouragement and support of me and my work. The thoughtful comments and questions from the additional members of my defense committee—Beth Helsinger, Alan Bewell, and Lynne Magnusson— were also much appreciated as they have helped me think more deeply about the future directions of my project.

The friendships that I have made in graduate school have been some of the most enriching of my life and this journey would not have been the same without all the late night conversations and celebrations that I enjoyed with the ‘Comps Group’: Glenn Clifton, Camilla Eckbo, Dan Harney, Colin Loughran, Brandon McFarlane, and Kailin Wright. Special thanks to Colin and Dan for the feedback both provided on drafts of my work and the friendship both continue to give. Also deserving of special thanks is my writing partner of the last year, Elisa Tersigni, whose enthusiasm, encouragement, and snacks helped propel me to the end of this project.

Warm thanks also goes to many friends outside the academy who have believed in me, cheered for me, and inspired me over the course of my degree (and my life), in particular Julia Sojoodi, Justin Ridley, Laura Crystal, Ned Baker, and Mike Oppenheim. My mother-in-law, Miriam Henriques, and sister-in-law, Monica, have also been an immense source of compassion and support for which I am grateful.

I would also like to acknowledge my aunt, Vera Arajs, a kindred spirit who passed away soon after this project began, but who supported and encouraged my love of literature for as long as I can remember and is much missed.

I owe my deepest thanks to my immediate family, not only for the lifetime of unconditional love and support they have given me, but also for the joy that they bring to my life, and the inspiration each of them is to me. To my parents, Ralph and Monica: it is impossible to say how much your unfaltering confidence in me has meant; thank you for encouraging me in everything that I have iv done, including this project, for always believing that I could do it, and for listening to me endlessly talk as I did it. To my siblings, Geoffrey, Sarah, and Anne: thank you for being my staunchest supporters and my best friends. Geoff, thank you for your constant reminders not to take things too seriously; Sarah, for your compassion and understanding when I did; and Anne, for reading every one of my “Margaret goes to lunch” novels and making my interests so deeply your own. Thank you also to the partners and children that have joined us over the years— Samantha, Marquis, and Jodie, Raeya and Isabel—for all the laughter and love you have brought with you and for the support you have given me.

Finally, I must thank my own partner, my husband, David, for always being there and always believing in me; day after day you make me feel like the luckiest girl in the world and I am forever grateful for your encouragement, support, patience, and love.

I would like to dedicate this project to my father, Ralph, whose love of literature and language so deeply inspired my own. Dad: I could not have done this without you or your incredible editing skills. You are, and will always be, my first, best, and most-loved reader. Thank you.

v Table of Contents

Acknowledgments iv

List of Abbreviations viii

List of Figures ix

Introduction Novel Nation 1

Chapter 1 Altogether English: Domesticating the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Pleasant Homeland Stories

i. Everybody’s World: Elizabeth Gaskell’s England 19

ii. A Tale of English Life: Mary Barton, Manchester, and English Culture 26

iii. National Locales: The Household Wor(l)d of Cranford 38

iv. Domesticating the Regional: North and South and The Life of Charlotte Brontë 52

v. Altogether English: Inventing “Mrs Gaskell” 72

Chapter 2 Solid and Substantial: Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire and the Influence of English Real(ist) Estate

i. Solid and Substantial: Trollope’s Fictional Foundation 76

ii. Great Impressions: Reflective Fantasies and Realist Reform in Early Barsetshire 85

iii. As if Art Were Life: Sequels, Series, and Real Fiction 101

iv. National Investments: Framley Parsonage and the Cornhill Magazine 113

v. Real(ist) Returns: Cultivating Character in Framley Parsonage 126

vi Chapter 3 Unsettling England: Daniel Deronda and the Deracination of National Life

i. On Land and At Sea: Reading from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda 142

ii. Comfortably Grounded: Eliot’s Early Realism 152

iii. A Puerile State of Culture: England’s Deep Roots and Narrow Horizons 168

iv. “So As By Fire”: The Discomforts of Deracination 185

v. In Medias Res: Narrative Middles and the Ethics of Becoming 201

Chapter 4 Consuming English Fictions: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and the Trap of Victorian Idyllism

i. Consuming Subjects: Dilution, Delusion, and Desire 208

ii. Aesthetic Distance: Distortion and Critique in Under the Greenwood Tree 217

iii. Pursuing Tess: Idyllism and Inscription in Tess of the d’Urbervilles 232

iv. Re-placing the Rural: Collecting, Correcting, and Controlling Wessex 242

v. Ginning Jude: Jude the Obscure and the Iron Teeth of Wessex 258

Works Consulted 281

vii List of Abbreviations

Works by Elizabeth Gaskell:

C Cranford LCB The Life of Charlotte Brontë MB Mary Barton NS North and South SL Sylvia’s Lovers WD Wives and Daughters

Works by Anthony Trollope:

A An Autobiography BT Barchester Towers DT Doctor Thorne FP Framley Parsonage TLCB The Last Chronicle of Barset OF Orley Farm SHA The Small House at Allington W The Warden WWLN The Way We Live Now

Works by George Eliot:

AB Adam Bede DD Daniel Deronda M Middlemarch

Works by Thomas Hardy:

FFMC Far From the Madding Crowd JO Jude the Obscure LW Life and Works of Thomas Hardy T Tess of the D’Urbervilles UGT Under the Greenwood Tree TW The Woodlanders

viii List of Figures

Figure 2.1 “Barsetshire” 136

Figure 2.2 “Trollope’s Barsetshire” 137

Figure 2.3 “The Cornhill Magazine: No. 1” 138

Figure 2.4 “Was it not a lie?” 139

Figure 2.5 “The Crawley Family” 140

Figure 2.6 “Mark,” she said, “the men are here.” 141

Figure 4.1 “[Uncaptioned frontispiece, Under the Greenwood Tree]” 274

Figure 4.2 “Thomas Hardy’s Wessex” 275

Figure 4.3 “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story” 276

Figure 4.4 “The Wessex of the Novels” 277

Figure 4.5 “Thomas Hardy’s Wessex” 278

Figure 4.6 “The Mellstock Church of the Story, Drawn on the Spot” 279

Figure 4.7 “Mellstock Church” 280

ix 1

Introduction

Novel Nation: Victorian Realism and the Fiction(s) of England

A modern reality, the nation state—and a curiously elusive one. Because human beings can directly grasp most of their habitats: they embrace their village, or valley, with a single glance; the same with the court, or the city (especially early on, when cities are small and have walls); or even the universe—a starry sky, after all, is not a bad image of it. But the nation-state? Where is it? What does it look like? How can one see it? And again: village, court, city, valley, universe can all be visually represented—in paintings, for instance: but the nation-state? Well, the nation- state…found the novel. And vice versa: the novel found the nation-state. And being the only symbolic form that could represent it, it became an essential component of our modern culture.

~ Franco Moretti, from Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1998)

When writing is published and read, it becomes as real as the world in which it circulates and which it represents; but writing would supplant that world if it had the chance.

~Walter Kendrick, from The Novel-Machine (1980)

“Here is the fact,” announces Anthony Trollope in an 1870 lecture entitled “On English

Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement”:

We have become a novel-reading people. Novels are in the hands of us all; from the

Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery-maid. We have them in our library,

our drawing-rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens,—and in our nurseries. Our memories

are laden with the stories which we read, with the plots which are unraveled for us, and

with the characters which are drawn for us. Poetry also we read and history, biography 2

and the social and political news of the day. But all our other reading put together hardly

amounts to what we read in novels. (108)

In thus describing the material and imaginative ascendancy of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century, Trollope asserts the democratic ubiquity of novel-reading: the fact that it had become an activity undertaken everywhere by everyone, regardless of class or gender, to the extent that it superseded all other types of reading combined. He also asserts the less perceptible, but no less real, results of this avidly pursued activity: the fact that the contents of these novels had become embedded in, entwined with the subjectivities, the everyday consciousness of their readers, so much so that they filled them: “Our memories are laden with the stories which we read…”

Indeed, Trollope’s designation of the Victorians as a “novel-reading people” is one that implicitly recognizes this habit as a defining feature of both their personal and collective identity, pointing towards not only what they do but also who they are: a people or nation whose material and subjective realities are bound to and filled with the novels, the fictions, that they read—a

“Novel Nation,” as it were.

The continuity between the Victorian novel and real life is also one that David Masson, an influential Victorian scholar and critic, observes in his early study of the novel, British

Novelists and Their Style (1859): “In a metaphysical sense, these phantoms of the human imagination are things, existences, parts of the world as it is, equally with the rocks which we tread, the trees which we see and can touch, and the clouds that sail in the blue above us” (30).

For Masson, novels produce fictions that are as solid and substantial—as real—as reality itself, a fact which prompts him to ask, “May they not, then, have a function in the real evolution of the future?” (30). The belief that they do have such a function—that they have real agency and effects in the world—is, of course, one of the driving forces behind so much of the Victorian realism produced in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a point that is articulated most 3 forcefully, perhaps, by George Eliot in an 1856 review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters,

Volume III, when she celebrates realism’s capacity to “remould our life” through its “humble and faithful study of nature” (368, emphasis added).

These authors, I suggest, saw themselves and were themselves seen as writing within a newly emergent, specifically English literary tradition that placed the novel as a genre, and their novels in particular, at the centre of a living national literature that was actively shaping the contours and character of the nation in very real and lasting ways. More specifically, I argue the representational claims to (and in some cases, denials of) “the real” that these authors made— particularly in relation to place—along with the critical constructions by reviewers and readers of these authors as cultural authorities and national icons, worked to shape a powerful new vision of the English nation as a fundamentally literary entity. By taking into account how the immediate reception of an author’s works influenced their subsequent writings, as well as how their writings influenced their readers, I examine the reciprocal, even porous relationship that existed between the Victorian novel and its readers—a relationship that reveals the seepage between fiction and reality that is at the core of this dissertation project. Thus, while my project examines the specific and varied ways in which these authors and their works imagined, engaged with, and challenged ideas of English national identity and the English nation, it is equally interested in exploring how they and their novels became (willingly or not) symbols and repositories of Englishness—how, 4 that is, they became England’s national culture—and, more broadly, how the English nation became rooted in, realized through, and reimagined by such fictions so that, to deploy my title in another way, England itself became a “Novel Nation.”

Crucially, I argue that the relationship between Victorian authors and their readership reveals not only a symbiotic project constructing fictional Englishness, but also a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the Victorian realist novel as a repository of Englishness, the idea(s) of the nation such novels had imagined, and the type(s) of readers/citizens it had produced. More precisely, my project traces a shift that takes place during the second half of the nineteenth century, as authorial confidence in the novel’s capacity to represent and stand in for the nation gives way to an awareness of its inability to adequately carry such a vast cultural burden and the dangers of trying to make it do so. This shift is forcefully registered in a shift in the ideological and aesthetic aims of later practitioners of the Victorian realist novel as they move from the desire, found in the realist novel of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, to comfort, locate, and cohere their readers within a rapidly changing and unfamiliar world, to a desire to discomfort and dislodge them from what now appeared to be a too comfortable, too provincial, and too confident subject position for the dynamic, expansive, and diverse realities that mark the end of the Victorian era. The refusal, on the part of readers, to accept this change, reveals itself in their insistent misreading of these later authors’ works and their continued efforts to incorporate those works and their authors into a coherent national imaginary.

In order to contextualize my project and further introduce its central concerns, I would like to briefly return to the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of a specifically English literary tradition and the ascendancy of the realist novel within that tradition and the nation at large. I will then turn to more contemporary critical discussions that have explored the link between the novel and the nation in order to situate my project amongst them, addressing as I do so the 5 particular role the Victorian realist novel played in shaping and reifying England’s national imaginary and identity in the nineteenth century. Finally, I will offer a short overview of my chapters in order to suggest the unique manner with which each author approached the challenges of imagining the English nation.

The idea of a nationally-bound literary tradition, and the central place of the Victorian novel within it, owes much to the literary critics and historians of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Victorian period literary histories were, as William McKelvy explains, transnational, multicultural, and multilingual—“divorced from national history” as it were—and the novel, a relatively new, not entirely reputable, genre was almost entirely excluded from them (44). In other words, there was no critical (or popular) conception of a history or tradition of “English

Literature” or the “English Novel” such as we have today: there was simply “Literature,” some of which was in English and very little of which were novels (62). At the beginning of the

Victorian period, however, prompted by the growing number of exclusively English readers

(particularly those without classical educations, including women, the working classes, and much of the middle class), the rise of nationalism and numerous nationalist movements, as well as increasing anxieties about internal fragmentation and “meaning loss” in light of newly visible regional and class divisions within England and British unification and imperial expansion without (Buzard 43), literary critics began to include England’s eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century vernacular novels in their histories in order “to distinguish a specifically English literary tradition for a specifically English audience” (Rodensky 4). As the reasons that prompted it suggest, distinguishing this national tradition can be read as a defensive measure, one that notably aligns the efforts of these critics with the efforts of many of the most prominent

Victorian novelists. As James Buzard persuasively argues in Disorienting Fiction, the 6 autoethnographic impulse, or inward (Anglo-centric) turn, that we see in “the great masterpieces of Victorian fiction” should be understood as self-conscious attempts on the part of these novelists to identify, locate, and delimit English culture in a moment when it was being diffused around the globe in such a manner as to threaten its depletion and dissipation (43). How their novels then became the very culture they sought to represent, define, and, at times, challenge, and the consequences of this becoming—of the novelization of England’s culture and nation— are the issues I explore in this project.

Immensely popular with Victorian readers, particularly those new middle- and working- class readers, these “new short histories of English fiction” were, McKelvy argues, “part of a…project that set out to encourage readers of different social standings and with different political and religious affiliations to be united in a common appreciation of the nation’s vernacular literature” (47-8). The novel became central to this tradition because, in addition to being written in the “real language” of common men, to adopt William Wordsworth’s powerful phrase from the 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (595), it was increasingly recognized by influential nineteenth-century critics as “a type of writing particularly suited to representing the character, mores, landscape and spirit of particular nations” (Warner 20) because of its capacity to represent a vast web of social relations, material realities, and abstract ideological forces in specific and comprehensive ways. Thus, as William B. Warner points out in his study of the pre- history of the link between the novel and the nation, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of

Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750, “[i]n a different but no less complete way than poetry, the novel is reinterpreted as a distinct expression of the nation” by these critics (20). Non-English texts were consequently eliminated from their literary histories, effacing the transnational,

“multilingual and ancient history of prose fiction” (McKelvy 46) and leading to “the well-known 7 story about the eighteenth-century rise of the novel” as a distinctly modern, entirely English innovation (41).

In order for this story to hold, however, the English novel also had to be separated from heroic and chivalric romances (genres overtly rooted in those older, multilingual, transnational prose fictions). This requirement led to the elevation of realist fiction, a mode of writing purportedly derived from “distinctly English discourses” about real (read: plausible, recognizable, English) life and manners (Warner 30-31). Then, as now, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson

Crusoe (1719) was used to mark the beginning of this tradition: its vivid “history” of an

Englishman’s efforts to replicate English life and society on an uninhabited tropical island offering a powerful origin story for the English novel that nationally-minded critics were quick to capitalize on. In these literary histories, then, the English novel effectively becomes conflated with the realist novel, and the realist novel, in turn, becomes an expression of English independence, individuality, rationality, and innovation, its proliferation “a corollary to the nation’s march to modernity” (McKelvy 54).

At the same time that the English novel was being disentangled from foreign influences, an increasing number of contemporaneous novels were being added to these literary histories, bringing them up-to-date and leading to the nineteenth-century “recognition” of the novel “as the age’s characteristic literary form” (62); where the eighteenth century had seen the rise of the novel, the nineteenth century was seeing its reign. As Robert Chambers would write in the second edition of his bestselling Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1857-9), not only was there a “rich abundance” of “prose fiction” currently being produced (indeed, the second volume of the

Cyclopaedia includes an entire section on novels published between 1830 and 1859), but the immense popularity of these works made it clear that “the novel ha[d] indeed become a necessity for our social life—an institution” (qtd. in McKelvy 61-2). That said, given the “abundance” of 8 novels being produced, which of them were to be institutionalized—included in such literary histories, officially recognized as exemplary English novels—was a topic of much debate; reviewers, presenting themselves as “cultural police responsible for protecting public standards of taste,” inserted themselves as mediators between novels and readers, proscribing and regulating critical value in order to separate the good from the bad (Thompson qtd. in Maunder,

“Discourses” 251). Indeed, as Rebecca Edwards Newman points out, “the years in which the

Victorian novel began its rise to power were also the years in which the periodical press expanded its reach and attempted to assert its own power by classifying novels and producing a subgeneric hierarchy” (Rodensky 4).

This desire to classify and police the English novel should be read as a desire to control ideas of (and in) the English nation, one that led to the elevation of particular versions (or visions) of England. Placed at the top of this hierarchy were those novels that were deemed the most solidly and vividly “English” in both form and content—in other words, those realist works that were felt to accurately express the character of the nation and its material realities, which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, generally meant novels that focused on rural or provincial life. Such works were singled out as particularly English because, as Raymond

Williams, Elizabeth Helsinger, and Michael Wheeler have all shown, it was outside of the expanding, cosmopolitan cities that England’s “true” history, heritage, and identity were increasingly believed to be located. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Victorian realist novel of provincial and rural life had thus become both a sign, symbol, and staple of Victorian

England and the apogee of England’s newly delineated literary tradition, a status that imbued it with national significance and exalted those held to be its greatest practitioners, including the four authors discussed in this project.

Significantly, the critical and cultural ascendency of the novel—its institutionalization and nationalization—that McKelvy, Warner, and Newman describe (and Chambers celebrates) was necessarily predicated on its material, commercial, and social ubiquity within Victorian

England. To explain this ubiquity we might look, as Kate Flint and Debra Gettelman do in their separate essays on “The Victorian Novel and its Readers,” to the expansion of reading audiences and the dramatic increase in both the production and accessibility of reading material that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Writes Gettelman: “The sense that encounters with fiction were not only an integral, but an integrated part of everyday experience in the 19th century started with a physical world that was rife with print” (114). Contributing to both this superabundance of print and the increasing demand or appetite for it were a number of significant social, political, and economic factors that were part of the broader changes taking place in England as a result of industrialization. These include advances in paper-making and printing processes, which resulted in cheaper production costs and increased production speed; population growth and the growth of cities, which created large, concentrated markets; improved distribution networks, which increased accessibility; and mass emigration and the development of large overseas readerships in the colonies, which expanded the market (Flint 19). Equally significant were public education initiatives and increasing literacy rates; the growth of circulating libraries and, in 1850, the establishment of free public libraries; the increase in regular rail travel (commuting) and the emergence of railway bookstalls; the rise of the middle classes and the idea of leisure time; and, finally, the gradual abolition of the “taxes on knowledge” and the resulting proliferation of cheap newspapers and journals (Gettelman 115-6).

The sheer “quantity of reading material that was diffused throughout everyday experience” as a result of these changes, Gettelman explains, “created a culture in which the experience or prospect of reading occupied a larger share of the collective consciousness than 10 ever before”—a culture, that is, in which “one experienced, or expected to experience, the world through reading” (114, emphasis added). What Gettelman is describing here is not merely the emergence of a mass reading public or the “common reader” as Richard Atlick famously calls this new group of “day-by-day readers” (Common 7), but of a mass mediated public: a public or nation whose experience of the world, whose very reality, in fact, is increasingly understood through reading. In this Gettelman echoes Trollope, and, like Trollope (and Chambers, and numerous other Victorians), both Gettelman and Flint assert that what this public was reading in increasing numbers and with increasing zeal were novels—a fact which made the cultural policing of the novel by literary critics appear all the more imperative to those who undertook it.

While the social, political, and economic changes just identified help to explain the rise in reading that took place in the nineteenth century, none exactly accounts for the remarkable ascendancy of the novel itself—for its particular appeal and popularity with Victorian readers.

Although literary histories and book reviews played a part in both legitimating and policing the novel, these were responses to the genre’s tremendous popularity, not the source of it—they would, however, influence reading habits (especially those of the middle classes) and contribute to particular novels’ success. Critical endorsements aside, then, there are numerous viable explanations to account for the novel’s phenomenal success with nineteenth-century readers. For instance, we might locate the novel’s appeal in its essential modernity: in the fact that it was a new, indeed a novel form that was understood as both a product and part of the modern world, implicitly making it a means of laying claim to that modernity—of asserting one’s own modernity (Flint gestures towards this explanation during her brief discussion of “runaway bestsellers” and the desire “to be in the know” [31]). Alternatively, we might find its interest in its seemingly endless capacity to reinvent itself: in the perpetual novelty of its form and content, as well as its tendency to encompass other genres of writing, effectively enabling it to satisfy 11 different tastes, suit different occasions, and meet different emotional and intellectual needs

(Mikhail Bakhtin famously celebrates this quality in his influential essay, “Epic and Novel” in

The Dialogic Imagination). More materially, we might point to the rise of serial fiction in the

1830s, a form that literally and symbolically linked the novel with the newspaper and other mass-produced periodicals (media forms which had, in this mediated age, become the predominant means of acquiring information about the rapidly changing world). This link indirectly imbued novels with their own sense of relevance, of necessity, even, as they too became part of their readers’ daily, weekly, and monthly experiences (a material and psychological integration into the everyday that Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund discuss in their groundbreaking study, The Victorian Serial). Most obviously, perhaps, we might look to the sheer entertainment, the pleasure the novel offered: after all, Victorian novels with their intricate plots, memorable characters, inevitable romances, titillating mysteries, and personable narrators are, quite simply, fun to read. Such explanations each contribute to our understanding of why the novel achieved the incredible popularity it did—and all factor into my study of the novelization of the nation in the chapters that follow; none, however, can independently account for the whole of it.

Even so, I would like to focus briefly on an explanation that may seem to be the inverse of many of the reasons just offered, but one that I believe is especially central to the novel’s emergence as a necessity for social and national life in the nineteenth century: the Victorian novel’s particular capacity to comfort and locate its readers (particularly its middle-class readers) in what was a period of rapid, radical, and frequently bewildering change. To explain: despite formally and symbolically embodying modernity, newness, innovation, and change, the

Victorian novel paradoxically also functioned as a defence against the very conditions that enabled it to emerge and thrive in the first place, offering its readers refuge and relief from the 12 feelings of loss, uncertainty, alienation, and dislocation that accompanied England’s Industrial

Revolution, imperial expansion, and the concomitant shift from a land-based economy and rural population to a manufacturing and trade-based economy and urban population. Such refuge and relief were offered in a number of ways, including the implicit “promise of underlying order and coherence, of knowability” and meaning that the novel, as an organized, intelligible, and contained narrative, “holds out” to its readers (Flint 30) as well as in the vivid “sense of place” that became a “key constituent” of the nineteenth-century realist novel (McDonagh 50).

The promise of knowability, which arguably cuts across all generic forms of the novel, is one that Raymond Williams examines in his seminal discussions of the novel as a “knowable community” in The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence and in The Country and the City.

Claiming that “[m]ost novels are in some sense knowable communities” because “the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways”

(Country 164), Williams examines the various narrative techniques that nineteenth-century

English novelists deploy to represent and, in doing so, render knowable their increasingly large, complex, and fundamentally unknowable society—from Charles Dickens’s vast, gradually revealed networks of interconnections that are “forced into consciousness” through the “general movement” of his narratives from obscurity, typification, and randomness to recognition, individualization, and causality (155) to George Eliot’s omniscient, inclusive, and sympathetic narrator who recognizes (and compels readers to recognize) “other kinds of people, other kinds of country, other kinds of action on which a moral emphasis must be brought to bear” by making these others familiar to her readers (166). For Williams, the nineteenth-century novel is, Terry

Eagleton explains, “one medium among many in which men seek to master and absorb new experience by discovering new forms and rhythms, grasping and reconstructing the stuff of social change in the living substance of perceptions and relationships” (Criticism and Ideology 13

34). A dynamic and innovative genre, the Victorian novel attempts to make sense of the experiences and world from which it emerged, to explore and explain “the stuff of social change,” and to accommodate its readers to new, novel realities by training them in new ways or structures of seeing, understanding, and, of course, feeling.

In this attempt to make sense of new realities and new relations, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the realist novel came to occupy such a privileged space in nineteenth-century

England (as well as in Williams’s theory of the novel as a knowable community). Indeed, as

Simon Dentith points out in “Realist Synthesis in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” given its

“capacity to provide a vivid impression of the presence and interaction of people in all their intensity and complexity” while conforming to broad canons of plausibility and reality (36) as well as its commitment to accommodating the ever-changing notions of plausibility and reality— to, that is, extending its social and psychological range in order to include areas of life, types of realities, previously excluded from representation—“a large claim can…be made on behalf of the realist novel…: that it represented for the nineteenth century a powerful exploratory device, which allowed societies to explain themselves to themselves in flexible and comprehensive ways” (41, emphasis added). In other words, even as Victorian realism self-consciously questions, resists, and disrupts inherited forms and moral values in order to accommodate new realities, as George Levine famously argues in The Realistic Imagination, the genre also, “almost invariably,” strives to “rediscover moral order” (20) and “reveal a comprehensible world” to its readers (18). “This, then, is one way of thinking of “realism,”” Dentith explains, “—not that it can be defended in some tightly managed epistemological argument, or that it prescribes one kind of writing over another, but that it is a way of acknowledging the shared social space that the writer and reader inhabit” and, in acknowledging that space, a way of making it familiar (41, emphasis added). 14

Yet, even as the realist novel acknowledges and explains the social space—the reality— that the writer and reader share it also, arguably, creates it. Indeed, as Josephine McDonagh argues, “literary realism…is produced by and produces our interactions with the environment and each other” (“Space” 52, emphasis added). Looking in particular to the “sense of place” the

Victorian realist novel famously “exude[s]” (50), McDonagh claims that, in addition to being

“markers that connect the literary text to the world that is evoked,” the vivid representations of place in these novels are also “part of a more profound shaping of the world that encompasses our perception, conceptions, and experiences of “reality” itself” (52). Place, in the realist novel, is not a reflection of reality, or even an explanation of it, but rather a productive supplement to it, one that heightens and alters our experience of the real world. Positing the emergence of this

“sense of place” as a reaction to—indeed, a defence against—“the experience of inhabiting a new and unfamiliar world” that England’s transformation from a rural, agrarian country to an urban, industrial empire engendered (50), McDonagh goes on to suggest that, in the Victorian realist novel, place “gives the effect of familiarity or recognition” to its readers (60). This effect encourages readers to feel they know the world of the novel, a feeling that is then extended to the real world that the realist novel evokes, making it feel familiar as well; in this way, the realist novel helps “make people at home in the [real] world,” giving them a sense of place within it

(63). That this new sense of place is found first in the novel suggests how its fictions move beyond merely reflecting or explaining new realities to encapsulate, substantiate, and even create them.

Of the places created by the nineteenth-century realist novel, the nation is perhaps its most ambitious, and McDonagh’s focus on the realist novel’s productive powers—its capacity to shape its readers’ perception and experience of reality by building new (novel) realities within it—accords with Benedict Anderson’s link between novelistic narration and the emergence of 15 national consciousness and the modern nation, originally outlined in his well-known study of the rise and spread of nationalism, Imagined Communities. According to Anderson, the “old- fashioned” (socially expansive, character-filled, realist) novel provides one of “the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation” by imagining an extensive yet bounded social world filled with characters who do not know one another (and might never know one another) but who live and act simultaneously in the same “homogenous, empty time” (25). These people (rather, these characters) are shown to be part of a “community in anonymity,” confidence in which is, Anderson claims, “the hallmark of the modern nation”

(36). As Anderson explains, a nation is inherently “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members…yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6)—of their “deep, horizontal comradeship,” their shared values, beliefs, practices, and history (7). The novel’s fictions of simultaneity thus foster or create the type of consciousness necessary for the reader to imagine being part of, and to have confidence in the existence (in the social and political power and the material reality) of such a community—particularly as they imagine their unknown contemporaries reading and responding to the same mass-produced texts they are reading and responding to. In doing so, the realist novel helps readers “think” the nation—to vividly imagine and therefore to comfortably inhabit the/their nation.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, since the nineteenth-century saw both the great flourishing of the English novel and English nationalism, Anderson’s brief analysis of the link between the novel and the nation (which only takes up a few pages in his original study) has proven particularly compelling to scholars of this period, myself included. There are clear limitations to his theory, however, and in her formidable study of the political and cultural uses of representations of the English countryside in the first half of the nineteenth century, Rural Scenes 16 and National Representations, Elizabeth Helsinger forcefully highlights what is, to my mind, the central one, offering alongside her criticism, a solution for it:

Anderson’s investigations tend to focus on the means of consensus rather than the

practice of dissent. Yet it is the clash of different imaginations of community, competing

claims both by and for alternative collectivities (including regions and classes), that

produces national consciousness at any given moment. A narrative of nation making that

includes unmaking, asserting and contesting, constructing and dissolving competing ideas

of collective identity may more closely approximate historical experience. The illusion of

a singular nation, a common dream, a shared imagination, is exactly what the supporters

of particular conceptions of a nation labor to create. (11, emphasis added)

And, it is precisely this narrative of nation making and unmaking, of the clash of different imaginations and competing claims regarding cultural and political representation and national belonging, that Helsinger discusses as she examines how different images and narratives of

English rural life “construct an imagined community, articulate the claims of alternative collective identifications, and, frequently, resist and criticize competing constructions of a national identity” (12).

My own project, likewise, looks to representations of rural, regional, and provincial spaces in order to complicate and, at times, disturb the idea of the Victorian realist novel’s unanimous complicity in the production of a singular and settled idea of the nation. My focus, however, is on the second half of the nineteenth century, at which point the only access to such places the majority of Victorians had was through the books that they read. While I agree with the above critics who argue the Victorian realist novel accommodates its readers to the disorienting and unfamiliar topography of industrial modernity by explaining that world to them and imagining/creating a cohesive identity and place for them within it, I also aim to complicate 17 this understanding of the novel. Indeed, even as they engage in the cultural labour of nation building, many Victorian novelists register their concerns about the idea of a nation founded on

(and found within) the coherent, cohesive, world of the novel by either intensifying or interrogating the link between the novel and the nation.

This dissertation proceeds chronologically, beginning in 1848, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her first novel, Mary Barton, a powerful attempt to reconcile the nation, and ending in

1895, when Thomas Hardy published his last novel, Jude the Obscure, a scathing indictment of

England’s national fictions. Although I do not attempt to trace a direct line of influence, such an arrangement allows me to consider how these novelists relate and respond to the realist projects that precede his or her own, even as they respond to the immediate public reception of their own works. In Chapters One and Two, which focus on early popular works by Gaskell and Trollope respectively, I consider the different ways their realist projects sought to locate, establish, and cohere England’s culture and character. More specifically, in Chapter One, “Altogether English:

Domesticating the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Pleasant Homeland Stories,” I consider how

Gaskell attempts to unify an economically and geographically disparate England by transforming

Manchester’s northern, working-class culture into national culture in Mary Barton, the small country-town of Knutsford into a national locale in Cranford, and Charlotte Brontë into a national icon in The Life of Charlotte Brontë. In each case, I argue, she is forced to domesticate—tame, subdue, and suppress—the more distinctive, regionally-bound aspects of the people and places she represents, something she does by commodifying and enculturing them, a process that effectively turns them into sterile emblems of a collective cultural heritage that circulates around the nation in the form of her books. In Chapter Two, “Solid and Substantial:

Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire and the Influence of English Real(ist) Estate,” I continue to think 18 about the ways in which Victorian realism established England’s culture and character through its literary landscapes. Looking to Trollope’s expansive Chronicles of Barsetshire, I consider how this fictional English county assumes a reality so powerful that it takes on the productive powers of landed property, conjuring for its middle-class readers a stable and respectable identity within the English nation, found, like Gaskell’s national culture, within the pages of his novels.

Chapters Three and Four, which examine the works and reputations of Eliot and Hardy respectively, shift the focus of my dissertation from how the Victorian realist novel locates and establishes England’s culture and character to how it begins to dislocate and disavow the nation as it had been imagined and realized in previous works of fiction. Entitled “Unsettling England:

Daniel Deronda and the Transfiguration of National Life,” Chapter Three focuses on George

Eliot’s efforts, in her last novel, to disrupt what she had come to perceive as a dangerously comfortable complacency and national narcissism her readers had fallen into, in no small part because of the English realist novel’s (her own included) narrow, insistently Anglo-centric focus.

By introducing foreign elements and actively disappointing and discomforting her readers, Eliot,

I argue, sought to dislodge, to deracinate her readers and her nation from the limited (and limiting) subject position into which they had settled. My final chapter, “Consuming English

Fictions: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and the Trap of Victorian Idyllism” looks at Hardy’s insistent, disparaging exposure of the fictionality of the romantic, idyllic rural scenes that were used over the course of the nineteenth century to represent the English nation. Here, I argue that while

Hardy’s “half-real, half-dream country” of Wessex became, within his lifetime, synonymous with rural England, and thus with the English nation, his acutely self-conscious, distorting aesthetic and elaborate use of paratextual materials (maps, illustrations, photographs, prefaces, and notes) exposes such fictions as destructive and delusive fantasies of the English middle classes. 19

Chapter One

Altogether English: Domesticating the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Pleasant Homeland Stories

Within the last few years we have lost greater English writers than Mrs. Gaskell; we have greater still left; but we have none so purely and altogether English in the worthiest sense of that noble word.

~David Masson, from Macmillan’s Magazine (December 1865)

Gaskell’s vocation was that of a peacemaker. She compels us to feel not how different men are, but how much they are alike.

~Harriet Parr, from British Quarterly Review (April 1867)

I. Everybody’s World: Elizabeth Gaskell’s England

In her review of Ellis Chadwick’s biography, Mrs. Gaskell: Haunts, Homes, and Stories

(1910), Virginia Woolf treats Chadwick’s subject, Elizabeth Gaskell, with some ambivalence: she acknowledges what “a pleasure” it is to read Gaskell’s works (343) but critiques a general lack of “personality” (342) in them and their author. As Valerie Sanders notes, for

“Woolf…Gaskell actually seems to have floated out of her own life,” thereby rendering

Chadwick’s attempt to describe her through the lens of the houses and towns in which she lived and the works that she wrote, futile (xxx). What hasn’t “floated” away of Gaskell’s personality remains, to Woolf’s mind, entirely ordinary, typical: “Mrs Gaskell would be the last person to have that peculiarity” of “doing everything in a way of [her] own….One can believe that she prided herself upon doing things as other women did them, only better…” (341, emphasis 20 added). With regard to Gaskell’s texts Woolf claims that the writing is unremarkable and the characters too familiar and therefore dull;1 the bulk of their pleasure lies, according to Woolf, in the “large, bright” world one finds therein (343). However, the pleasure of this world appears to be contingent on precisely the lack of personality Woolf complains of and, despite her criticism,

Woolf concedes a unifying, inclusionary power to its apparent absence: “Yet it may be a merit that personality, the effect not of depth of thought but of the manner of it, should be absent. The tuft of heather that Charlotte Brontë saw was her tuft; Mrs. Gaskell’s world was a large place, but it was everybody’s world” (342).

Whether we agree with Woolf or not as to Gaskell’s lack of a textual personality— acknowledging that we, with our access to the earlier author’s surviving letters, inevitably read her novels with a stronger sense of her private self than was available to Woolf2—there is something strikingly suggestive about the idea that Gaskell’s literary world, in its lack of a distinct, unique personality, becomes “everybody’s world.” In fact, I would like to suggest that

Woolf’s comment inadvertently touches on a significant impulse within Gaskell’s work, one that can be readily identified in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), a historical novel set during the French

Revolutionary Wars in which we witness a defiantly local and isolated whaling town—a distinct

“personality” as it were—being incorporated into the English nation—a place broadly imagined as “everybody’s world.” As the tourist-narrator tells her readers, in the sixty-odd years between the events she narrates (in the final years of the eighteenth century) and her visit to Monkshaven

(in the middle of the nineteenth century), the town has been dramatically “altered” (SL 502). No longer a small coastal town, “shut in” by its “wild bleak moors” and fierce independence (1),

1 Of Gaskell’s writing, Woolf remarks, “cut out a passage and set it apart and it lies unclaimed” (342) and of her characters, “her heroes and heroines remain solid rather than interesting…depress[ing] one like an old acquaintance. One will never get to know them” (343).

2 Gaskell’s very determined efforts to keep her private life out of the public eye are explored in the concluding section of this chapter, and are one of the primary reasons Woolf and her contemporaries knew so little about the popular Victorian author. 21

Monkshaven has become a “rising bathing place” for tourists (502), connected to the rest of

England by a national network of railway tracks, telegraph lines, and postal routes. Accordingly, its local colour—its unique personality—has been domesticated and commodified, made both rational and consumable for (and by) the English public, a process the novel itself performs by recording, with all the romance of historical fiction, a tale of Monkshaven’s parochial past and selling it for private consumption and entertainment to England’s reading public in the present.

Significantly, this transformation is precipitated by both the violent repression and the gradual integration of Monkshaven’s fiercely independent personality, as evinced by the novel’s juxtaposition of the state execution of the “headstrong upholder” of individual and local rights,

Daniel Robson (arguably one of Gaskell’s most original and powerful personalities), and the successful business ventures of the “cautious, conventional respecter of authority,” Philip

Hepburn (A. Sanders, Introduction xi). In the case of Robson, his local loyalties lead him to rebel against the government sanction on impressment when it threatens Monkshaven’s community, while Hepburn’s bourgeois values inspire him to gradually expand his local business beyond

Monkshaven’s borders, inherently aligning his interests with those of the industrializing nation.3

Although sixty years later both men are dead and all but forgotten (an impulse the novel notably writes against by recording their stories), Monkshaven’s physical and economic expansion suggest that Robson’s parochial, anti-national localism has been superseded by Hepburn’s entrepreneurial, middle-class nationalism, allowing Monkshaven to be incorporated— economically, geographically, ideologically, and imaginatively—into England.

3 Early in the novel Robson and Hepburn have a spirited debate about the government’s sanction on impressment, which serves to forcefully establish their opposing values: where Hepburn claims the law is in place “for the good of the nation, not for your good or mine,” Robson refuses to recognize any claim made by such an abstraction, “Nation here! nation theere! I’m a man and yo’re another, but nation’s nowheere…I can make out King George, and Measter Pitt, and yo’ and me, but nation! nation, go hang!” (SL 40-1). Unfortunately it is Robson who will, quite literally, “go hang” after he chooses the local over the national and is tried for treason.

With this example in mind, Woolf’s comment about Gaskell’s inclusionary aesthetic seems less a condescending concession to a “delightful” author than a perceptive insight into

Gaskell’s work in which individual and local/regional distinctions and divisions are repeatedly— insistently—subdued in favour of a national whole (Woolf 341). Writes Woolf: “When we look at her work in the mass we remember her world, not her individuals” (343). However, what

Woolf does not appear to register (what gives her insightful “yet” its condescending ring and what makes her dismissal of Gaskell’s characters seem so unfair) is the acute self-consciousness, the cognizant hand, with which Gaskell executes this domestication and incorporation both in and through her texts. In other words, what Woolf doesn’t give Gaskell credit for is the fact that in Gaskell’s works local distinction and personality are deliberately domesticated in order to be incorporated into the emergent middle-class nation that she broadly envisions as “everybody’s world.”

Ostensibly undermining this claim of deliberate domestication is the fact that Gaskell’s oeuvre is habitually recognized for its concern with the “qualities of particular places” (Pite,

Hardy’s Geography 71) and “distinct culture[s]” (Knezevic 405); for what has been described as her investment in the “details of [everyday] life” (Lowe 194) and her “passion for [the] local”

(Uglow 49), as well as her “fascination with wild and remote landscapes” (Foster 116) and the

“strange and wild behaviour” she associated with such places (119). Certainly, Gaskell’s eagerness to record the customs, manners, stories, memories, and peculiarities of specific places, periods, and people—an eagerness readily apparent in the profusion of local detail that permeates both her letters and her works—suggests an appreciation for local and regional personality and a desire to preserve it. But, what is also clear is that this enthusiasm for the local is matched by a deep investment in the politics of reconciliation, synthesis, and unity—in making readers “feel not how different men are, but how much they are alike,” as Harriet Parr would write in her 1867 23 essay on Gaskell’s works (530, emphasis added). Thus, even as Gaskell celebrates the details and characteristics that distinguish or mark a particular region, culture, or individual, she also relentlessly strives “to provide a model for the synthesis of such differences into a new kind of unity” in and through her writing (Dainotto 77).4

Indeed, much like the localism of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, whose national tales and historical romances (which Gaskell read and enjoyed as a schoolgirl) simultaneously celebrated and attempted to integrate the distinct cultural landscapes of Ireland and Scotland into the national culture of Great Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Gaskell’s investment in the details of particular places and cultures is essentially nationalist in its interests.5

Unlike Edgeworth and Scott, whose works attempted to define, represent, and consolidate a

British nation that included Ireland and Scotland, Gaskell focuses on delineating and unifying the

English nation, which, by the 1830s and 1840s, had become increasingly divided along lines of social, political, economic, and geographic disparity due to rapid, yet uneven, urban and

4 While Roberto Dainotto is referring specifically to North and South (1855) when he writes of this model, a work that is arguably Gaskell’s most blatant attempt at such synthesis, his description is, I would argue, applicable to Gaskell’s work as a whole. Certainly, Gaskell’s efforts at reconciliation have not gone unnoticed, and there have been numerous critical studies about Gaskell’s literary efforts to mediate between the “warring factions” (Pite, Hardy’s Geographies 71) and opposing categories around which so much of Victorian culture appeared to revolve, including, for instance, those of male and female (Foster, Ingham, Stoneman), public and private (Gallagher, Harmon, Poovey), body and mind (Matus, J. Taylor), North and South (Dainotto, Mullen), urban and rural (Dennis, Hughes), and masters and men (Childers, Williams).

5 Literary historians and critics typically identify Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott as the earliest practitioners of British regionalism (see, for instance, Bellamy, Duncan, Pite, or Snell). Written in an era of national (and global) crisis and consolidation—which significantly includes the political absorption of Scotland and Ireland into the United Kingdom in 1707 and 1801 respectively—their works (most notably Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent [1800] and Scott’s Waverly Novels [1814-1831]) offered detailed descriptions and romantic histories of Ireland and Scotland to a predominantly English audience who knew little-to-nothing of these “new” British peripheries. As Scott explains it in the General Preface to the Waverly Novels (1829), by helping to make the English “familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland,” Edgeworth “may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up”; accordingly, his own works were written in the hopes of “achiev[ing] for [his] own country [something] of the same kind” (352-3). Yet, it was not merely about making the different regions of the newly United Kingdom familiar to one another; rather, as Duncan points out, the regional distinctions of Ireland and Scotland presented by Edgeworth and Scott were able to represent the newly activated category of British nationhood “precisely because they distinguish these places from England, and from each other, in a multinational—not English—constitution” (327). For an insightful discussion of how the regional literature of Scotland and Ireland contributed to the formation of a British national identity, see Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism.

24 industrial development, unequal political representation, and severe economic depression.

According to Ian Duncan in his compelling overview of nineteenth-century regional and provincial fiction, “The Provincial or Regional Novel,” the “critical resurgence of regional fiction at the end of the decade [the 1840s] focused on the industrial north and midlands”—a resurgence of which Gaskell was a part—was a direct result of this “intensification…of social crisis” within England (325).6 However, unlike the earlier regional fictions by Edgeworth and

Scott, this mid-century “regionalism decisively loses its ideological capacity to stabilize the figure of the nation” (325, emphasis added), Duncan claims, because it proves unable to contain the “dislocating forces of industrial and finance capitalism” and is thus unable to preserve the local character of the nation put forward by regionalism (330). For Duncan, this failure is what causes regional fiction to be replaced in the 1850s and 1860s by provincial fiction, with the chief difference between these modes being that the regional novel “specifies its setting by invoking a combination of geographical, natural-historical, antiquarian, ethnographic, and/or sociological features that differentiate it from any other region” (322) and is thus “the source of its own terms of meaning” (323), while the provincial novel’s setting “is defined more simply by its difference from the metropolis” and is thus negatively dependent on the metropolis (on what it is not) for its meaning (322). In other words, regional fiction emphasizes the distinctiveness and independence of its inhabitants and setting (their “personality” as it were), while provincial fiction highlights their generic, contingent nature.

Briefly singling out Gaskell in this shift, Duncan claims that her “literary career tracks the dissolution of regionalism and its replacement by…provincialism with exemplary clarity” (330), a statement which seems fair when comparing Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of

6 According to Duncan, the regional novel “represents the ideological crisis of a national history, whether the nation is a project still to be assembled or one that is falling apart” (326); thus where it was the formation of the British nation that prompted Edgeworth and Scott’s regional novels, it is the English nation’s disintegration that prompts the “regional resurgence” in the middle of the nineteenth century when Gaskell begins writing. 25

Manchester Life (1848) to her last, Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story (1864)—indeed, the very titles seem to announce the works as respectively regional and provincial in scope and setting. However, the process is not nearly as straightforward or complete as Duncan’s claim suggests, and any application of his opposing definitions of regional and provincial settings to

Gaskell’s work—his desire to read Mary Barton as wholly regional and Cranford (1853) as quintessentially provincial, for instance—seems to miss the complex ways in which the two categories overlap within each of her texts as she utilizes local and regional personality in the production of a national culture. Indeed, Gaskell’s settings are rarely regional or provincial; instead, they are repeatedly shown to be both at once: particular and generic, distinctive and similar, independent and contingent, exclusive and inclusive, and it is precisely this bimodality that makes Gaskell’s world so compelling to “everyone.”

Living and writing in Manchester, the centre of the industrial North, I believe Gaskell vividly recognized the uncontainable nature of industrial and finance capitalism and, rather than writing against capitalism by attempting to identify local and regional pockets that preserve a nation outside it (as, say, the Yorkshire-born Brontë sisters do), she actively embraces it in her work, deliberately transforming those local and regional cultures into commodities to be consumed by the nation as a whole and used in the formation of a national culture. Accordingly, rather than attempting to preserve the essential otherness or distinctiveness of a region as such,

Gaskell attempts to find and, at times, create, points of commonality, of connection between the regions of which she writes and the national audience to whom she writes—to show how much they are alike. In short, Gaskell’s acceptance—even celebration—of the changes that were transforming the nation (of, that is, modernization and industrialization) led to her persistent efforts to bring the local and regional into this modern nation, to locate them (or at least subdued aspects of them) within it. In the sections that follow I look to four very different, but very 26 popular works by Gaskell—her two industrial novels, Mary Barton and North and South (1855), her comic sketches of country-town life, Cranford, and her biography of Charlotte Brontë, The

Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)—in order to explore her use of regional culture and local personality in the production of a unified, seemingly inclusive, national culture that is imagined as being available to everyone. More specifically, I seek to demonstrate how Gaskell’s texts work to engender a new kind of national unity based on domesticated—tamed, commodified, rationalized, idealized—versions of England’s local and regional cultures and geographies as well as the people most representative of them.

II. A Tale of English Life: Mary Barton, Manchester, and English Culture

National disparity and division between the classes, and the “bitter…consequences” such division threatened (Gaskell, Preface, MB 3),7 prompted Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton: A

Tale of Manchester Life, a work Raymond Williams famously describes as “the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s” (Culture 94).8 Certainly one of the most popular of the condition-of-England novels that appeared in the 1830s and 1840s,9 Mary

Barton offers an early example of Gaskell’s endeavors to replace local, class identifications with national, trans-class ones by employing the tropes of regional fiction; in doing so, Gaskell

7 As Jill Matus notes, Mary Barton was “[w]ritten with an eye on revolution abroad and Chartism at home” (“Mary Barton and North and South” 27).

8 The writing of Mary Barton was also prompted by a more personal grief: the death of Gaskell’s infant son, William, in 1845 (see Shirley Foster’s Introduction and Uglow 150-55). Woven into the fabric of the narrative, this loss is expressed in the narrator’s unabating empathy and sympathy for the losses suffered by those she describes, masters and men alike, and these emotions are, in part, what make Mary Barton such a “moving” work.

9 The “Condition-of-England Question” is a phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1839 to address the difficulties, dilemmas, and discontents of an industrial society, including the conditions of the working class; as the scope of his question makes clear, these were issues that concerned the nation as a whole—not just the industrial cities in the North. That Gaskell sees her work as contributing to this national discussion is clear from her choice of epigraph, which comes from an 1832 essay by Carlyle, “Biography,” about the relationship between reality and fiction. With regard to its popularity, Mary Barton was a national bestseller, with three editions coming out in less than five months; for details see Foster’s Note on the Text and Easson’s Introduction to The Critical Heritage.

27 establishes an aesthetic practice wherein local distinctions and social differences are emphasized in order to be domesticated—tamed, nationalized—and, when necessary, discredited.

Focused on the working-class inhabitants of Manchester, England’s first, largest, and fastest growing industrial city and the political and economic “capital” of the newly industrialized North,10 and narrated from the perspective of an inhabitant of the city who has personally seen, indeed, has been touched by the suffering described,11 Gaskell’s novel attempts to capture “the feel of everyday life in the working-class homes” and neighbourhoods (94) of

Manchester for the middle-class reader to whom such realities would have been widely unknown. At the same time, this “Tale of Manchester Life,” educates its readers in Manchester’s cityscape and culture, vividly detailing the city’s topography and local character—particularly those places and customs associated with the working class—and pioneering the urban regional novel in the process. Indeed, in its deliberate use of many of the recognized conventions of regional writing (made familiar by Edgeworth and Scott)—including ethnographic or “thick” descriptions of manners, customs, dress, and superstitions, detailed descriptions of local sights and sounds (including the use of local dialect), and extensive footnotes and appendices explaining the regional and cultural particulars of Manchester’s working class to the reader—

Gaskell’s work seems “to be predicated on the idea that there is such a thing as a distinct culture of the Manchester working class, and that this thing can be isolated for the attention of a concerned middle class,” as Borislav Knezevic points out (405, emphasis added). Here, class—

10 In 1750 Manchester’s population was less than 15,000; by 1800 it had grown to 75,000, by 1820, 125,000, and, by 1850, its population was more than 300,000. At the same time, the construction of canal and railway systems in the early and mid-nineteenth century promoted inter-regional cohesion and strengthened economic bonds between the previously unconnected northern locations; at the centre of these networks was Manchester, “the shock city of the age” as Asa Briggs so famously dubbed it in Victorian Cities (87).

11 Not only does Gaskell live in Manchester where she is “elbowed…daily in the busy streets” by “the care-worn men” and women she writes of—literally touched by them—but she herself has suffered with the death of her son (Gaskell, Preface, MB 3); see footnote 8, above. Gaskell’s proximity to the working class—her first-hand knowledge of them—along with her own suffering are the wellsprings from which she draws her authority in Mary Barton. 28 specifically Manchester’s working class—becomes something of a region: “a social area inhabited by people of a certain kind, living in certain ways” that is distinct from anywhere else

(Williams qtd. in Guest 79, fn. 2).

The perception of Manchester’s working class as a discrete cultural group within England is not, of course, unique to Gaskell; as Alan Shelston has noted, in the 1830s and 40s Manchester was to become “the most talked about and the most written about city in the land”—possibly even “the western hemisphere”—because of its “status as a symbol of the new industrialism”

(“Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester”). Much of this talk would, in turn, focus on the newly emergent class of urban industrial workers—their social, economic, and political position (or lack thereof) as well as their dialect, habits, customs, and living conditions—collectively producing a sense of their distinctiveness, their strangeness, indeed, their otherness from those who read about them and the rest of England.12 And yet, Gaskell’s regional, ethnographic efforts, like Edgeworth and Scott’s before her, are insistently engaged in a broader undertaking than that of merely documenting the cultural particularities of Manchester’s working class and offering them up for public consumption as points of interest, information, or even sensation; instead, they are engaged in what James Buzard describes as “a national, class-uniting autoethnography”

(46, emphasis added). As the term implies, rather than studying other, foreign cultures as ethnography does (a field that, unsurprisingly, emerged alongside British imperialism), autoethnography looks to one’s own culture in an attempt to both locate and reify it.13 In Mary

12 For examples of such discussions see Kay-Shuttleworth’s The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), and Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845).

13 In Disorienting Fictions: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, James Buzard contends that a “self-delimiting…auto-ethnographic project informs—that is, does not merely arise in but comes to preoccupy—the British novel after 1801” (11). Essentially a “defensive” measure taken against the possible “meaning loss” threatened by British unification, imperialism, and internal transformation (e.g., urbanization, industrialization, etc.) (43), Buzard argues that nineteenth-century British and English autoethnography “imagined into being a national culture represented as if it might be autarchic, autotelic, and above all, locatable” within the domestic landscape (107). 29

Barton then, Gaskell aims to show her readers how recognizably English Manchester and its workers are—to, that is, locate England’s national culture within Manchester’s regional culture and, at the same time, show Manchester’s regional culture to be part of England’s national culture.

In order to convincingly do this, however, Gaskell is compelled to subordinate class affiliations and perspectives to national ones; as Carolyn Lesjack explains:

Faced with the cultural anxiety wrought by the possibility of internal disruption and

division, the industrial novel emplots a paradigmatic structure wherein the attempt to

represent the fearfully internal Other—the working class—necessitates its eventual

absorption into a new community, one whose membership admits an identification

beyond that of class interest, in the place of class distinctions; that is, the unifying

ideology of the national body. The cementing of this national ideology is predicated on

the erasure of class and gender inequalities. Or, as Benedict Anderson has formulated it,

“regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in the imagined

community of ‘nation,’ the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal

comradeship.” (“Modern Odyssey” 81)

In other words, the imagined community of the nation succeeds only when potentially divisive affiliations and perspectives (or those seen as potentially divisive) of class and region are absorbed by, contained within, and/or subordinated to its “deep, horizontal comradeship.”

Accordingly, Mary Barton’s nationalist agenda is “predicated on the discrediting of perspectives

[seen] as limited to class” (Buzard 46), and the concurrent celebration of those that are seen as transcending (or willing and capable of transcending) class. Gaskell’s “thorough specimen of a

Manchester man” (MB 7), John Barton, is the obvious choice for this narrative discrediting of

30 class-limited perspectives: not only is he the novel’s principal representative and most vocal defender of Manchester’s working class (he is, in fact, the union’s spokesperson) but, as the novel unfolds and working-class suffering goes unaddressed by the middle and upper classes

(industrialists, politicians, Parliament), he becomes increasingly antagonistic towards them until

“the only feeling that remained clear and undisturbed in the tumult of his heart, was hatred to the one class, and keen sympathy with the other” (165). These class-bound feelings of intense hatred

(for the middle and upper classes) and keen sympathy (for the working class) are subsequently given explosive expression in Barton’s violent assassination of Harry Carson, the conceited, arrogant son of a local factory owner whose own class-limited perspective leads him to refuse to enter into negotiations with the workers’ union, the members of which he will not (cannot?) see as his neighbours or even, one suspects, as humans.14 Carson’s refusal to talk with the union (a stance he persuades the other factory owners into taking as well) effectively prolongs the strike and the workers’ suffering, and further fuels class resentment, misunderstanding, and, ultimately, division. Neither man, nor the collective he represents, is able to sympathize with the other because their class-bound perspectives limit—indeed, eliminate—their capacity to do so; the result, as Gaskell makes clear, is good for neither: Carson winds up dead, while Barton ends up desolate, defeated, discredited and, eventually, dead as well.15

In place of such dangerously limited and limiting class identifications, Gaskell’s novel celebrates a working-class culture that allows itself to be assimilated into and sees itself (and is itself seen) as part of the broader culture of the nation—a culture like the one commemorated by

14 Carson’s attitude is suggested by the caricature of the “lank, ragged, dispirited, and famine-stricken” workers he produces for the entertainment of his fellow factory owners (MB 179)—a representation of the working class that dehumanizes, demeans, and belittles them and their suffering.

15 Lesjak notes that this mode of discrediting working-class characters is, in fact, the norm of the genre: “A “crime” committed by an individual member of the working class—be it theft, murder, or some act of violence—functions initially to rob working-class voices of their political legitimacy” (“Modern Odyssey” 81).

Margaret Jennings, a blind, working-class singer who performs Manchester folk songs for the public or Alice Wilson, an old working-class nurse, who shares with Mary and Margaret (and the reader) idyllic memories of her rural childhood home. Where Barton’s/the union’s violent allegiance to their own class explicitly refuses a trans-class, national (comm)unity,16 Margaret’s songs and Alice’s stories evoke a pre-industrial past implicitly shared with the rest of England— working-class or not.17 The local and personal are also the national here. What’s more, even as they evoke a shared national past, these songs and stories gesture towards the loss of this past: an experience/feeling that actively connects the classes in the present.18 Gaskell’s emphasis on Job

Legh’s botanical and zoological studies and Jem Wilson’s industrial innovations further reveal an overlap between working- and middle-class values as both embrace the cultural ideals of self- help, industry, and education. Gaskell’s aim in Mary Barton then, is not simply to “give some utterance to the agony which… convulses this dumb people”—to simply make known the unique culture and condition of Manchester’s working class in order to assert their distinctive voice and elicit sympathy and aid for them (something Barton himself tries to do when he visits Parliament in an effort that notably results in failure19)—but to elucidate how “bound to each other by

16 As does Harry Carson’s and the “violent party” of factory owners for whom he speaks at the meeting with the workers’ union (MB 178, emphasis added).

17 As Pearl L. Brown notes, Wendy Craik “points to references to the Bible, popular songs, and folklore in Mary Barton as evidence that Gaskell wanted to illustrate that there were still “strong links with a pre-industrial past, oral tradition, and a way of life”” in Manchester (“Progress or Decline?” 352); Margaret’s songs and Alice’s stories contribute to these links.

18 Throughout Mary Barton Gaskell invokes the experience of loss—from the general loss of traditional ways of life, to the more personal loss of a family member or loved one (in particular her loss of her infant son, which she alludes to in her preface, Barton’s loss of his wife and son, and Henry Carson’s loss of his son)—as an experience that both transcends class and affectively binds the classes to one another.

19 Barton goes to London intending to “[speak] out about the distress that they say is nought,” assuming “when they hear o’children born on wet flags, without a rag t’ cover ’em or a bit o’ food for th’ mother; when they hear of folk laying down to die i’ th’ streets, or hiding their want i’ some hole o’ a cellar till death come to sent ’em free; and when they hear o’ all this plague, pestilence, and famine, they’ll surely do somewhat wiser for us than we can guess at now” (MB 86). When Parliament refuses to even hear the union leaders speak, Barton returns to Manchester convinced that the nation will never hear their pleas for help: “we mun speak to our God to hear us, for man will not hearken; no, not now, when we weep tears o’ blood” (96). The inclusion of this brief episode suggests Gaskell was 32 common interests,” experiences, feelings, and values are the “factory-people in Manchester” and the middle-class readers in England and, in doing so, to reveal them as belonging to one culture, one nation (Gaskell, Preface, MB 3-4).

Of the values, experiences, and feelings just identified, however, none are patently, exclusively English; thus, a crucial technique that Gaskell employs to restrict this “common interest” or cultural identity to England is to emphasize the linguistic bond between them. She does this by locating the Manchester workers’ patois—a mark of their regional identity—in a quintessentially English cultural and linguistic tradition, using the works of Chaucer, Wycliff,

Langland, Spenser, and Shakespeare (among others) to gloss the seemingly unfamiliar terms and speech patterns for her middle-class readers. For instance, when George Wilson, explaining his request for money to Barton says, “I donnot want it for mysel’, tho’ we’ve none to spare. But don ye know Ben Davenport as worked at Carson’s? He’s down wi’ the fever…,” Gaskell includes the following footnote:

‘Don’ is constantly used in Lancashire for ‘do;’ as it was by our old writers.

‘And that many non Hors don.’ – Sir J. Mandeville.

‘But for th’ entent to don this sinne.” – Chaucer. (MB 57)

By revealing the supposedly “foreign” (or at least, unfamiliar) language of the Manchester working class to have its origins in a traditional and culturally valued form of English, Gaskell subsumes this local difference into the national whole, effectively turning the novel’s apparent ethnographic representation of cultural difference into autoethnographic representation of cultural sameness (Buzard 47).20 In Ralph Pite’s terms, such canonical glosses declare “the

aware her project had to do something more than merely describe the condition of Manchester’s working class if it were to succeed.

20 Both Edgeworth and Scott explained or translated the Irish and Scottish dialects used by their characters in extensive footnotes, making the culture of Ireland and Scotland both comprehensible and consumable for English audiences. However, explaining or translating foreign terms and expressions is different from locating them in the 33 centrality to English culture of this marginalized form of the language” (General Introduction xi), a fact that reveals above all else—above all class and regional identifications and characteristics—that Manchester’s workers are English. Similarly, the chapter epigraphs in Mary

Barton are taken primarily from poems and plays by widely-read English authors such as Byron,

Crabbe, Coleridge, Elliott, Keats, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, suggesting that this “Tale of

Manchester Life” (and the working-class experiences delineated therein) can be understood in relation to England’s national literature—indeed, that they are all part of England’s national culture. More than simply identifying “grounds for understanding and sympathy between the class for which it wrote and the class of which it wrote,” as Knezevic claims it does (406),

Gaskell’s Mary Barton identifies a common identity that both transcends such class divisions and projects a new kind of unity for the nation—a cultural unity founded on common history, values, and feelings and found within its language and its literature, its stories and its songs. The English nation thus conveyed “emerges as the ultimate horizon of cultural identity” (Buzard 47), the

“world” to which “everybody”—from Manchester’s working-class families to London’s middle- and upper-class readers—belongs.

Yet as the early critical emphasis on Mary Barton’s regional distinctions—its

“picturesque individuality” (Tayler 140) and “good local descriptions” (Literary Gazette 65)— suggests, Gaskell’s initial efforts at incorporating Manchester’s working class into the English nation were not entirely successful. Although Manchester was certainly understood to be a part of England geographically and economically (and, after Mary Barton, perhaps even linguistically), it and its labourers remained marked more by their cultural and ideological

English language as Gaskell does; thus, where Gaskell’s glosses seek to eliminate difference and domesticate Manchester’s working-class dialect, Edgeworth’s and Scott’s appear to preserve Irish and Scottish difference. For a detailed discussion of the political agenda of such footnotes see Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism.

This transformation of ethnography into autoethnography is, Buzard argues, the point of both Mary Barton and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke.

34 difference from their middle-class readers than their similarity to them. Indeed, Jem and Mary’s emigration to Canada at the novel’s end suggests Gaskell’s inability to envision a meaningful future for them within England. Moreover, while all of the reviews published recognized

Gaskell’s efforts at class reconciliation—her “noble ambition of doing real good by creating sympathy, by diffusing information, and removing prejudices,” as the reviewer for the Edinburgh

Review puts it (Greg 163)—many felt that the work exacerbated rather than mitigated class antagonism by misrepresenting class relations in Manchester and sensationalizing class conflict.

Gaskell’s apparent failure—her middle-class readers’ continued insistence on seeing

Manchester’s working class as potentially threatening others—stems in part from what Raymond

Williams identifies as a “fear of violence,” specifically a fear of working-class violence,

“widespread among upper and middle classes at the time” and inadvertently fueled by Mary

Barton (Culture 97).21 As Williams explains it, by turning her primary working-class representative, Barton, into a murderer, she dramatizes the “fear that working people might take matters into their own hands” (97).22 In so doing, Gaskell arrests all imaginative identification with and sympathy for him and his class (including, Williams provocatively contends, her own23) and perpetuates her readers’ sense of both their otherness and the risk they posed. Consequently, although Gaskell intends Barton’s crime to reveal the dangers of a perspective limited to class

21 Gaskell’s private response to accusations of having fueled rather than abated class antagonism reveals how unanticipated such a response was: “No one can feel more deeply than I how wicked it is to do anything to excite class against class; and the sin has been most unconscious if I have done so. <…> I could only repeat that no praise could compensate me for the self-reproach I should feel, if I have written unjustly” (Gaskell Letters 67).

22 Although this fear was, as Williams points out, largely unfounded—the few cases of working-class violence in England being the exception rather than the rule—the working-class revolts that erupted across Europe the same year that Mary Barton appeared seemed to give substance to the fear of a more widespread revolution.

23 Despite insisting on her continued sympathy for Barton—claiming in a letter to Mrs. Greg that “‘John Barton’ was the original title of the book. Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the person with whom all my sympathies went, with whom I tried to identify myself at the time, because I believed from personal observation that such men were not uncommon” (Gaskell Letters 74)—certain narrative cues (discussed in footnote 24) suggest that, like so many of her middle-class readers, this was not a sympathy Gaskell was entirely able to sustain after his violent crime.

(and therein highlight the need for a national perspective that transcends class), its violence ultimately places him and the workers he represents outside the bounds of civility and thus outside the bounds of both the novel and the nation Gaskell aims to unite.24

This image of working-class violence was not, however, the only image perceived as threatening the self-consciously civilized nation of Mary Barton’s bourgeois readers: by the middle of the nineteenth century, England’s national identity had become bound to both its metropolis and its countryside—both of which were located in the South (the former by fact and the latter by fictions25) and both of which were implicitly threatened by England’s industrial and ostensibly uncultivated North. Not only did Manchester and England’s other industrial cities

(Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool), appear to challenge the cultural and economic hegemony and centrality of London,26 but the seemingly wild and untamed volatility of the northern countryside and its inhabitants, so famously (or infamously) celebrated in the works of the Brontë sisters

(Charlotte’s wild “tuft of heather” is, after all, distinctly located in Yorkshire), also seemed to challenge the rural stability and domestic tranquility of England’s idyllic South. Thus, much like

24 Barton’s passing beyond the bounds of civilization and community are emphasized by the shift in narrative focus that takes place after his crime as the political relations of master and man are displaced by the romantic relations of Mary and Jem. Moreover, when we encounter Barton again, sixteen chapters after the murder, he is described as an “automaton”—a machine without a soul and thus, one assumes, without humanity (MB 341). Although Gaskell attempts to reintegrate Barton into civilization, community, and even humanity with his confession and repentance, his death takes him beyond the bounds of such human concerns, suggesting that such a reintegration is impossible.

25 In Rural Scenes and National Representations: Britain, 1815-1850, Elizabeth Helsinger shows how mass reproduction and dispersion of images of the countryside in the nineteenth-century helped to bring the English nation into being “by creating conscious national identifications around representations of English rurality” (13); more specifically, around images of a “secure, productive, and tranquil rural Englishness, drawn from certain areas of the South and the Midlands” (8). At the same time, London, long the political and cultural centre of England, was growing at an unprecedented rate as countless men and women left the country to live and work in the city. And, while this demographic redistribution contributed to the demand for and emotional attachment to images of rural England, as Helsinger points out, it also prompted a parallel demand for images of England’s urban centre, answered, most famously and fully, by Charles Dickens who placed London firmly in the centre of England’s national consciousness. That London also provided the principal contrast for artists of the rural only further emphasized the centrality of the metropolis in constructions of England’s national identity.

26 London was not the only city to experience massive growth as people moved from the countryside into the city: Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham all attracted multitudes of migrants looking for work in city factories and businesses. The growth of all these cities led to England becoming the first nation in the world to have the majority of its population residing in urban areas. On Manchester’s growth see footnote 10.

36 the “new faultline of class produced by industrialization” (Duncan 330) which divided England socially and economically into Benjamin Disraeli’s “two nations,” “the RICH and the POOR”

(65-6), these ideologically charged “latitudes of the imagination” (Dainotto 81) divided England geographically into regions perceived as fundamentally antithetic and antagonistic to one another—the North and the South.27

With its intensely local, northern focus then,28 Gaskell’s first novel was seen by many to feed into this geographic division, much as her depiction of working-class violence was felt to feed into class divisions, and, as its Manchester-residing author, she herself “acquired a regional identity,” as Pamela Corpron Parker points out (“Literary Tourism” 129). Gaskell did not, however, think of herself as bound to a particular region: although she loved her rural childhood home of Knutsford, located near both Manchester and Liverpool, it was her “dear adopted native town” and she was a self-proclaimed “Londoner by birth” (Gaskell Letters 28, emphasis in original) who only came to live in “the great manufacturing town” of Manchester after her marriage (14). Additionally, although she would live in Manchester for the rest of her life,

Gaskell travelled extensively throughout England, Wales, Scotland, and Europe, and eventually purchased a home in Hampshire, where she hoped to retire with her husband; her sudden death in

1865 left this hope unrealized. A product then of England—of North and South, city and country—rather than just one of its regions, Gaskell continually sought to promote geographic

27 Donald Horne’s well-known delineation of the Victorian stereotypes of North and South suggests how antithetical their characteristics were understood to be: “In the Northern Metaphor Britain is pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious and…[guided by] economic self-interest. In the Southern Metaphor Britain is romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous, and…[guided by] order and tradition” (qtd. in Dainotto 82).

28 Although John Barton travels to London and Mary and Jem move to Canada, the narrator/narrative does not follow them: John tells of his experiences (see footnote 19) while the narrator dreamily envisions (“I see…”) the couple in the Canadian wilderness in the last scene of the novel (MB 378). The two occasions when the reader is taken outside Manchester—during the opening worker vacation day in Green Heys Fields and during Mary’s bewildering trip to Liverpool to speak at Jem’s trial—serve as foils to Manchester and thus further highlight Manchester’s particular qualities through contrast, effectively enhancing the novel’s local focus.

37 synthesis and ideological unity within England by drawing on her personal knowledge of it in her works. However, in light of Mary Barton’s “failure” to make readers feel and acknowledge this unity (indeed, its apparent exacerbation of difference), Gaskell’s later writings aim not simply to make known the shared culture of England’s various regions, but to actively make it—to, that is, create and disseminate a shared national culture. To accomplish this, Gaskell celebrates the exclusive qualities of particular places—those details of local and regional life that her readers so eagerly consumed and which she so passionately recorded—even as she transforms them into cultural commodities that circulate throughout the nation in the form of literary texts and imaginary locales around and within which a national community can be imagined; we see this process most vividly in Cranford (1853), discussed in the next section of this chapter, as she transforms her “dear adopted native town” of Knutsford into Cranford, a literary landscape that is at once exclusive and inclusive, local and national, real and imaginary.

Such a national project was not, however, without costs. As Gaskell had already realized when writing Mary Barton, to effectively achieve any force of unity, any national whole within which local and regional culture would be incorporated rather than destroyed, radical assertions of and allegiances to local distinctions—to those potentially subversive, divisive qualities of particular places and distinct cultures—had to be subdued and re-imagined in harmonious relation to that whole. In other words, regional personalities (both the places themselves and the people who inhabit and represent them) had to be domesticated, their distinctiveness tamed and nationalized. And, as discussed above, in Gaskell’s work we see the subduing of such qualities most dramatically in the deaths of characters like John Barton and Daniel Robson, men whose fierce localisms (regional, socio-economic) irreconcilably alienate them from the nation as a whole. Gaskell’s awareness of and sympathy for the violence engendered and the individual and local costs demanded by national synthesis is, however, pointedly demonstrated by the tragic 38 nature of these deaths and the pervasive nostalgia her texts exude for the very distinctions and personalities they subdue. In other words, Gaskell’s texts mourn and memorialize that which they domesticate and commodify. Nowhere are these costs more evident or more real than in The

Life and Work of Charlotte Brontë (1857), the text examined in the fourth section of this chapter.

Although a piece of non-fiction, Gaskell employs the same techniques developed in her novels to highlight and then incorporate the distinctive qualities of both Yorkshire and Brontë, taming the northern “wildness” that threatened the security of England’s southern, middle-class identity by transforming both place and person into consumable components, even representatives, of

England’s national culture. This transformation, however, ensured (and effected) their mutual effacement as both region and author became sterile—safe, knowable, consumable, ideal— versions of themselves. Notably, such cultural effacement implicitly foreshadows Gaskell’s own fate; and, my conclusion will briefly consider the costs of this nationalizing project for Gaskell herself, as she is transformed into the charming and conventional “Mrs Gaskell,” a domestic, national ideal without a distinctive personality of her own.

III. National Locales: The Household Wor(l)d of Cranford

Although she would later be celebrated for (and conflated with) her charming and seemingly apolitical stories of rural England, it was the topicality, controversy, and, of course, the popularity of Mary Barton that brought Gaskell to the attention of Charles Dickens.

According to Thomas Recchio, Dickens was impressed not only with Gaskell’s talent as a novelist, but also with her direct, insider knowledge of and experience with both the position of women and the industrial north—two of the most widely-debated topics in the mid-Victorian era

(33-4). Hoping to profit from this talent and knowledge, Dickens wrote to Gaskell in 1850 inviting her to contribute to his forthcoming London-based journal, Household Words (1850- 39

1859). His approach, as has often been noted, was one of deferential flattery that suggests an appreciation of her work for both its moral and economic value, as well as for its apparent continuity with his own aesthetic values and ambitions:

As I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to

enlist in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly

affected and impressed me), I venture to ask whether you can give me any hope that you

will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages. […] I should set a

value on your help which your modesty can hardly imagine; and I am perfectly sure that

the least result of your reflection or observation in respect of the life around you, would

attract attention and do good. (Dickens qtd. in Recchio 34-5).

Unsurprisingly, this complimentary solicitation from one of the most popular authors in England proved irresistible, and Gaskell responded by sending him a new story of Manchester life,

“Lizzie Leigh” (1850). Dickens published Gaskell’s story as the journal’s inaugural piece, positioning it immediately after his “Preliminary Word.”29 Over the next eight years Gaskell contributed more than twenty works to the magazine including her comic sketches of provincial life, Cranford, which appeared at irregular intervals from December 1851 to May 1853 under the provisional title “The Cranford Papers,” and her second industrial novel, North and South, which appeared weekly from the beginning of September 1854 until the end of January 1855. Although the relationship between Dickens and Gaskell would, rather notoriously, become “severely strained” (Keating 7)—most notably during the serialization of North and South, which “led to prolonged battles” between the two as Gaskell struggled (and refused) to conform her writing to the strictures of serial publication (Uglow 343)—they continually shared a common aesthetic

29 For an insightful discussion of the significance of “Lizzie Leigh” to Household Words see chapter 1 of Recchio’s Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History.

40 ambition: that of uniting the English nation in and through their art.30 And, for both, Household

Words was a means to achieving this goal.

Founded as a platform from which to directly address the English public, Household

Words consciously contributed to what Lauren Berlant calls the “National Symbolic” (20): the

“shared spatial and temporal experiences [that] reflect, perform, and/or affirm” a collective consciousness or national subjectivity (32). Seeking to “produce a fantasy of national integration,” of legitimacy and belonging (22), the national symbolic relies on discursive practices that make the national culture and identity local, that is, particular, relatable, intelligible, and consumable: Household Words set out to do just that.31 Delineating his ambitions for Household Words in “A Preliminary Word,” Dickens also announces his nation- building/unifying agenda, even going so far as to linguistically model the collective identity he aimed to inspire with his unified and inclusive use of the first-person plural. He writes:

We aspire to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household

thoughts, of our readers. We hope to be the comrade and friend of many thousands of

people, of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, on whose face we may never look.

We seek to bring into innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the

knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render any of

us less ardently preserving in ourselves, less tolerant of one another, less faithful in the

30 Dickens’s efforts to produce a national whole are discussed at length by Buzard in “Anywhere’s Nowhere: Bleak House as Metropolitan Autoethnography” (chapter 5 in Disorienting Fictions); for a discussion of those efforts within Household Words see Sabine Clemm’s Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood: Mapping the World in Household Words (especially chapters 1 and 2).

31 In his well-known study of the origins and spread of just such national intimacy, Benedict Anderson famously links the rise of the periodical press to the rise of the nation as a primary order of identity, citing newspapers and magazine as both reflections of and active participants in the production of the “imagined community” that is the modern nation. He writes: although everyone reads his or her copy of a newspaper of magazine in “silent privacy…each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (35). Accordingly, the masses of readers imagine themselves (and one another) as “part of a community that, literally, buys into the same values as expressed in the publication of their choice” (Clemm 4).

progress of mankind, less thankful for the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of

time. […] We have considered what an ambition it is to be admitted into many homes

with affection and confidence…We know the great responsibility of such a privilege; its

vast reward; the pictures that it conjures up, in hours of solitary labour, of a multitude

moved by one sympathy… (1, emphasis added)

As Sabine Clemm points out, in voicing “the journal’s desire to transcend (if not dissolve) all social boundaries—even while upholding national ones”—Household Words’ widely-read manifesto asks its readers to imagine themselves in the same way the journal imagines them: as a

“single, in some senses homogenous community,” united by common affections, thoughts, and sympathies (8).32 Dickens ensured his journal simulated the unity of affection, thought, and sympathy he hoped to inspire in readers by electing to have most of the material in Household

Words appear unsigned; thus, although its articles “rang[e] over a multitude of subjects,” from current events and social issues, to educational material and entertainment in the form of verse and fiction, Household Words expresses a collective identity by appearing “to speak with a single voice” (Dickens qtd. in Clemm 8): the unified “we” of “The Preliminary Word.”

Notably, not all of Dickens’s writers were pleased with this arrangement as it necessarily suppressed their individual voices and identities in favour of Household Words’ homogenous voice and identity.33 Not so with Gaskell: despite her authorial conflicts with Dickens, Gaskell found herself liberated by this anonymity and embraced the security it offered, explaining in a

32 Examining Household Words’ “ever present preoccupation with what it means to be English” using Anderson’s theory of the nation as an imagined community, Clemm argues for its “particularly pertinent” status in the production of England’s national identity, “not simply because it forms part of the genre” which Anderson identifies as central to such productions, but because “it actively and consciously endorses the idea of an imagined community between writers, editors, and readers in its quest to find a unified (and manifestly English) ‘voice’” (3-4).

33 Clemm writes, “the omission of authors’ names…created some resentment especially among the younger contributors such as Wilkie Collins or George Sala, who made their first serious entry onto the literary stage in Household Words” (10).

42 letter to George Smith, “No one knew that it was I that was saying this or that, so I felt to have free swing” (Gaskell Letters 577). While she was open with friends about which pieces in

Household Words were hers, Gaskell’s ready acquiescence to publishing within the journal’s dictum of collective anonymity underscores the affinity between her aesthetic aims and those

Dickens imagined for his magazine: both saw the need to subdue individual identities in order to promote a collective identity, a cohesive whole. The echoes in language identified by Recchio between Dickens’s “Preliminary Word” and Gaskell’s “Preface” to Mary Barton further underscores this affinity, revealing a mutual investment in the “romance” of “familiar things” and fiction or “fancy” as a means through which mutual understanding and sympathy—the emotive bases of community—can be evoked (35-7).

Despite all their aesthetic and ideological affinities, however, Dickens and Gaskell envisioned and represented the English nation in significantly different fashions: where Dickens imagines England (and Englishness) as radiating out from London/the metropolis,34 Gaskell refuses this southern, London-centric vision, imagining instead a nation in which England’s disparate parts—the North and the South, the rural and the urban, the metropolis and the peripheries—are reconciled and synthesized into a new kind of English unity based on a shared cultural identity that transcends local and regional affiliations yet remains rooted in and bound to a distinctive and knowable community. Yet, as I suggested above, because of the “failure” of

Mary Barton to effect such unity, Gaskell’s later writings aim not simply to make known this

34 The centrality of London to Dickens’s aesthetic is eloquently described by Murray Baumgarten in his essay “Fictions of the city”: To read Dickens is to encounter an urban writer whose work does not only rely on the city for the setting of plot and character, but rather situates London at the centre of his fictions: it is the generator of plot and the determining element of scene and setting. […] Dickens articulated in his writing a connection between the making of urban fiction and the invention of modern urban life. He charts the impact of the city that was the central railroad station of the nineteenth century: everything in that world passed through it. In the process of coping with its extraordinary fullness, Dickens explores his world-city’s modern world-making power. (113-4) For Dickens, “a cockney” who was “marked in everything” by his relationship to London, the British metropolis was not only the centre of the nation but also its maker (109).

43 shared culture as she had attempted in her first novel, but to generate it. And, nowhere are these efforts more evident—or successful—than in Gaskell’s most popular work: her “accidental novel,” Cranford (Recchio 33). Arguably the most well-known and well-loved of Gaskell’s works, Cranford, perhaps more than any other piece of writing to appear in Household Words, realized the magazine’s ambitious hope to “live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts, of our readers”—to become, that is, a part of each and every reader’s “household” (personal, domestic, everyday) world. Cranford achieved this position, I argue, because it was not just a shared textual experience, but a shared culture, history, and community—a shared locale—that came to exist beyond the confines of the text for many of its readers. Lauded by reviewers as chief among Gaskell’s “pleasant homeland stories”—a text “that will survive, as long as people care to know what our England was at the days in which our lot was thrown” (Masson 517)—the laughter-provoking sketches of English country-town life collectively produced what I am calling a national locale: a singular, distinctive, and personal locale imaginatively and emotionally inhabited by and emblematic of the nation as a whole.

Looking over the textual history of Cranford, it becomes clear that from the very beginning Gaskell’s Cranford was not in the “possession of the Amazons” as its memorable first line purports (C 1), but rather in the “possession” of its readers, for it was their enthusiasm for the original sketch that prompted Gaskell to write more installments concerning “Our Society at

Cranford.”35 Hence, although Gaskell was the author, the readers of Household Words were, in many ways, the force behind the creation: their desire for Gaskell’s imaginary locale was responsible for its continued production. Of course, this desire was cultivated by the text itself:

Dickens’s choice of title for the first story, “Our Society at Cranford” deliberately encourages

35 That Gaskell never intended to continue Cranford beyond “Our Society” is made clear in an 1865 letter to John Ruskin, who wrote to her admiring the book: “The beginning of ‘Cranford’ was one paper in ‘Household Worlds’; and I never meant to write more, so killed Capt Brown very much against my will” (Gaskell Letters 748).

44 such readerly enthusiasm and engagement with the text and the town for, as Julian Wolfreys notes, its first-person plural pronoun suggests a playful “oscillation…between the our of

Cranford and the our of the implied readership” (75).36 Like the first person pronouns of “The

Preliminary Word,” then, “Our Society” invites readers to see themselves as part of Cranford and thus bound to one another through their shared society at Cranford. At the same time, however, it marks Cranford as a distinct community of its own, one that exists independent of the reader—it all depends on how one reads the compass of “Our.”37 The title also captures (and advertises) the subtle oscillations and ties between the national and the local, the reader and the text, the public and the private, and the inside and the outside, that the reader will find at play within the narrative itself, for Cranford/Cranford is carefully crafted as both a text and place that is at once local—that is distinct, personal, knowable, and, locatable—and national—abstract, communal, mythic, and portable—and thus it invites the reader to inhabit both geographies at once, to, that is, become part of a national locale.

This relationship between the local and the national is most fully explored in the relationship between personal memory and communal history that operates in both the text and the town. Filled with memories of Gaskell’s childhood in “the little, clean, kindly country town” of Knutsford (Gaskell Letters 15), Cranford is something of a personal memoir made public, a point implicitly emphasized by the text’s narrative structure.38 Not only are the “The Cranford

Papers” represented as a collection of Mary Smith’s memories of past visits to the “charming”

36 Gaskell sent all of the installments of Cranford to Dickens untitled. In the volume edition, published 1853, many of the titles Dickens assigned are abbreviated, thus “Our Society at Cranford” becomes more simply “Our Society”—an even more inclusive title.

37 In Wolfrey’s terms: “‘our’ encompasses in its imagination both social snobbery and elitism [i.e., distinction and difference] and comprehensive acknowledgement [i.e., similarity and sameness]” (75).

38 Responding to John Ruskin’s letter praising Cranford Gaskell enthusiastically asserts its veracity: “And it is true too, for I have seen the cow that wore the grey flannel jacket—and I know the cat that swallowed the lace, that belonged to the lady that sent for the doctor, that gave the emetic &c!!!” (Gaskell Letters 747). 45 country town and the “adventures” there witnessed, but many of her memories involve the even more temporally distant memories of Cranford’s Amazons—those “ladies of Cranford” with houses “above a certain rent” who reign, husbandless, over the community (C 1). Taken together these layered memories of personal pasts simultaneously form and unite both Cranford the town and Cranford the work. During “The Great Cranford Panic,” for instance, we are told of Miss

Matty and Miss Pole’s refusal, despite all current anxieties about dangerous robbers in Cranford, to renege on their annual celebration of Mrs Forrester’s wedding anniversary. Not only does this tradition bring the ladies of Cranford together to celebrate a personal memory that has, over the

“many years” of such visits, produced the collective memories of a shared tradition, but the visit furnishes Mary Smith with an amusing anecdote for her “Cranford Papers” and is thus woven into the fabric of the town’s history as she records it for the reader (97). Significantly, the evening’s visit also provides Cranford’s preeminent storyteller, Miss Pole, with a story about

Mrs Forrester’s “terror of ghosts,” which Miss Pole eagerly relates to Lady Glenmire the following morning (101). Such reiterations of the ladies’ experiences abound within

Cranford/Cranford, suggesting the importance of stories (which, in this case, are also always memories) to the town’s constitution. Writes Tim Dolin: “So little actually happens in Cranford that its most valuable currency is language, and ‘happenings’ become important only in their exchangeable forms, as stories. Discourse displaces experience in episodes of reading and writing, talking and listening, recalling and recounting” (“Cranford Collection” 200). Rarely, however, do the ladies tell their own stories; instead, they stand in “for each other as historians—

Miss Pole narrates the history of Matty and Mr Holbrook, Matty narrates the history of Deborah, and so forth”—producing what Dolin describes as “communal mythologies” that seamlessly blends past with present, private with public, and self with other (200).39 Much like the “little

39 In her chapter on Gaskell in Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture, Ann Colley describes how collective 46 hanks” of string Mary “pick[s] up and twist[s] together” (C 41), the memories and stories of the ladies of Cranford are collected and bound together by each other and by Mary, together becoming the content, the structure, and the foundation of the town and the text.

In sharing their stories and thus sharing their lives, the ladies of Cranford construct a community founded on personal memory; in transforming her own memories into stories for public consumption, Gaskell tacitly offers them as a foundation for a community outside of the narrative. That is, her memories are situated to become both the individual and collective memories of the reading public as they circulate throughout England in the widely read pages of

Household Words. This transfer of memory is brought about, in part, by the narrative’s peculiar narrator, Mary Smith, whose anonymity and liminality enable readers to slide into her subject position—and thus participate in her act of recollection—with minimal discomfiture. What little we do learn of her, including her generic name and vaguely defined relationship to the town

(neither of which are mentioned until the last few installments), seemed designed to do more to enhance the anonymity and ambiguity of her identity and position than to resolve questions about them. What we do know is that Mary, like the reader of Household Words, has a life outside of the stories she narrates, and that she, again like the reader, “vibrates” (154) between Cranford and that outside world. Mary highlights this shared outsider status not merely by documenting the peculiar customs, manners, and adventures of the ladies of Cranford for the reader, but by gently laughing at them and inviting the reader to do the same: “Do you ever see cows dressed in grey flannel in London?” she archly asks after describing precisely this sight in Cranford (5, emphasis added). The reader, of course, cannot help but to laugh with her (and, notably, with the other readers of Cranford), agreeing that she has not seen such a sight in London—or anywhere

memory in Cranford “glosses over change and differences in time by repeatedly moving the past into a seamless present, [offering], through a shared set of rituals, the illusion of belonging to a communal identity where remembrance occurs among people, not within the solitary individual’s mind” (75). 47 else for that matter—for it is a spectacle unique to, and indicative of, Cranford, a place to which we are initially all outsiders.40

Yet, like Mary, whose involvement and investment in the town grows over the course of the narrative, the reader increasingly becomes less an amused observer and more an emotional participant in the joys and sorrows of the town as she shares in its past and present: “Read it,” an early reviewer from the Examiner emphatically advises his own readers, for within “a dozen pages…you are among real people, getting interested in them, affected by what affects them, and as curious to know what will come of it all as if it were an affair of your own” (195). In fact, so invested will we become that, “[b]efore [Cranford] ends, we somehow have taken her [Miss

Matty, the “heroine of the book”] entirely into our hearts—her and the whole of her little history”

(196-7). And, because Matty’s “little history” is inseparably twisted together with the history of the other ladies of Cranford—of, that is, Cranford itself—such an incorporation of her into our hearts marks the incorporation of Cranford as well. Having encouraged this affectionate investment all along—our laughter was, after all, always meant to endear—Gaskell finally allows us to become a part of Cranford’s exclusive-inclusive society: in the novel’s concluding line she has Mary acknowledge that “we all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us” (C 160). Here, the use of the collective present tense linguistically incorporates both Mary and the reader into Cranford’s affective, memory-bound community. The differences between the ladies of Cranford and “us,” so pointedly emphasized at the beginning of the series, have disappeared under the recognition of more powerful shared affections and relations: “we all love…we are all of us better…” The emphasis on inclusive pronouns in this

40 In the immensely successful BBC television adaptation of Cranford starring Judi Dench, Cranford (2007) and Return to Cranford (2009), Bessie is silently invoked as a symbol of the town, revealing both its quirkiness (for dressing a cow in flannel) and its compassion (for dressing a cow in flannel rather than putting it down). When she is hit by the train in Return to Cranford (a substitute for Captain Brown who it seems the mini-series couldn’t bear to kill), we recognize the danger such modernization poses to the traditional community in this adaptation, which is certainly more nostalgic and less dynamic than Gaskell’s original work.

48 sentence—the double use of both “we” and “us,” and the placement of “us” at the end (of both the sentence and the entire series)—conclusively opens the doors of Cranford to the “we” of the intended audience who are now permanently bound to Cranford—and to one another—by shared sympathy, mutual belonging, and collective memory of Cranford, text and town: “we are all of us.”

As a medium of personal-made-communal memory of life in a small country-town in

England, Cranford is arguably part of an aesthetic that, as Elizabeth Helsinger has claimed, self- consciously “organized a national audience around personal and collective memories of rural

English origins” (121): like Alice Wilson’s memories of her rural childhood home or Margaret

Jennings’s folk songs in Mary Barton, Mary’s memories of her visits to Cranford seem to evoke

England’s pre-industrial past, predominantly because so many of the memories shared by the elderly ladies who live there are from this time. However, it is important to remember that

Mary’s memories are not from this time: Mary travels between Cranford and her father’s home in the “great neighboring commercial town of Drumble” (a fictionalized version of Manchester)

(1), presumably via train, revealing that her memories are of much more recent origin.41 Thus,

Cranford is at once a collection of memories of the pre-industrial, rural past and a record of the industrial(izing), modern(izing) present. Indeed, Gaskell’s narrative contributes to the genre of autoethnographic fiction via its quasi-anthropological study of contemporary English country- town life. Not only was the work originally presented as a series of papers rather than stories, hinting at their factual (rather than fictional) status, but as Hilary Schor points out, the originally

41 “Cranford has a complicated time scheme,” writes Charlotte Mitchell in her introduction to the work: “It is set in an approximation of the present, the 1840s or early 1850s, but the first chapter, before Miss Jenkyns’s death, seems to belong to the late 1830s. Chapters 3 and 4 take us back to Miss Matty’s love-affair, in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Her parents’ love letter, read in Chapter 5, take us back still further, to the 1770s” (xv). All of these memories, however, are presented in relation to the present of the story—Miss Matty’s love-affair, for instance, is narrated only after she abruptly encounters her former suitor while shopping with Mary in Cranford; in many ways then, these memories are as much about the past as they are the present that has evoked them.

49 unidentified Mary Smith opens these papers by posing as something of an anthropologically- inclined journalist reporting on her sojourn in a strange culture—a role she returns to throughout her subsequent papers as she highlights the idiosyncratic social conventions, phraseology, superstitions, and manners of Cranford society (Scheherezade 86).

That said, in Cranford Gaskell does more than simply record the peculiar characteristics and customs of this small country-town;42 as Duncan points out, Gaskell actively “tests the relation of the little town to the wider world”—to, that is, the forces of modernity that are transforming England as a whole (industrialism, urbanization, even imperialism) (330)— allowing us to see the process by which this particular country-town absorbs, accommodates, and adapts to the pressures and demands of these national forces. As strange or idiosyncratic as it and its practices may appear (may, in fact, be), then, Cranford is undergoing a transformation that is anything but, and what Smith/Gaskell’s record ultimately records is the experience of modernization, of the slow, not entirely linear, transformation from a distinct, detached locale into a connected, modern one—an experience that the whole of the nation was undergoing. (The arrival of the railway and Dickens’s fiction in the first installment and Miss Matty’s shift from a lady to a lady-shopkeeper who stocks teas from China in the final one are all indicative of this transformation.) In this way, Cranford is shown to be both a local space—a place of distinction and difference, a place with its own unique personality—and a national space—“a typical rather than a local setting” (Duncan 330), an iconic space that is representative of the changing nation.

Cranford’s essential bimodality—the fact that it is at once distinct and typical, local and national, traditional and modern(izing)—suggests that Gaskell did not see it as a static, idyllic retreat from the stresses and shocks of urban, industrial life; indeed, unlike Alice Wilson’s rural childhood home (which both Margaret and Mary recognize is no longer there), Cranford is a

42 Something she had done in Cranford’s American-published, non-fiction predecessor, “The Last Generation in England” (1849). 50 place that continues to exist—in fact, if Miss Matty’s position at the end of the novel is any indication, to thrive—in the modern world, but it does so by changing—by adapting, accommodating, and incorporating the changes that were transforming the nation. At the same time, however, Cranford the book is static, and reading it does function as a sort of retreat from the challenges and stresses of the present: as Gaskell herself would admit in an 1865 letter to

John Ruskin, “It is the only one of my own books that I can read again;—but whenever I am ailing or ill, I take ‘Cranford’ and—I was going to say, enjoy it! (but that would not be pretty!) laugh over it afresh!” (Gaskell Letters 747). Rather like “the rose-leaves” that Mary tells us are gathered and made into “a potpourri for someone who had no garden” and “the little bundles of lavender flowers” that are “sent to strew the drawers of some town-dweller, or to burn in the chamber of some invalid” by the ladies of Cranford (C 15), Cranford itself preserves the peculiarities—the personality and culture—of Cranford as it was when Mary visited (pressing them in its pages as it were), even as it “bundles” them together and transforms them into a cultural commodity that circulates throughout the nation—a literary locale that affectively and imaginatively unifies the nation.

Four decades after Cranford’s first appearance, Anne Thackeray Ritchie (the eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray) opens her Preface to Macmillan & Co.’s 1891 special edition reissue of the work with her memories of first reading it:43

My father has written of the memories connected with the writing of books, and of the

scenes and feelings which are printed on the pages, quite other from those which they

recount. And there are also the associations of the readers as well as of the writers. One

scene in Cranford always comes back to me, not only for its own most pathetic value, but

43 Part of the Series of English Idylls—which included Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and Mary Mitford’s Our Village—Macmillan’s reissue of Cranford was published with illustrations by Hugh Thomson, which were drawn in a style that came to be known as “the Cranford school.” For a detailed discussion of these illustrations and their significance to later readings of Cranford see chapter two of Recchio’s Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.

because I saw my father reading it. I can still remember him coming through the doorway

just as I had finished the chapter, when not without some agitation and excitement I put

the close printed number of Household Words into his hand….The story was that of

Captain Brown and he sat down and read it then and there…but indeed I did not think of

it as a story at all, it seemed to me rather that I had witnessed some most touching and

heroic deed, some sad disaster…Dear Captain Brown!...loved and remembered far

beyond the narrow boundaries of Cranford….Ever since the winter’s evening when I

made my first acquaintance with that delightful place it has seemed to me something of a

visionary country home, which I have visited at intervals all my life long… (v-vi)

Incorporated into Ritchie’s personal past, Cranford/Cranford has become a “place”—a

“home”—she visits to remind her of her father and her childhood, its “narrow boundaries” expanding to encompass her own experiences. Moreover, as she shares her memories of reading it, she continues the Cranford tradition of forging a memory-bound community: her readers will now share in her memories as well as Gaskell’s and the ladies of Cranford’s. Yet even as

Gaskell’s story reminds Ritchie of her father, it is Captain Brown who steps out of the pages of the work to be “loved and remembered.” Cranford and its inhabitants have become so woven into the fabric of Ritchie’s memory that they have become something of a reality, a place and populace that exist outside the pages of Gaskell’s fiction.44 She goes on to make this reification explicit when she describes her real-life visit to Knutsford. As she wanders through the town,

Ritchie finds herself shifting between the real place and the imagined one:

[S]ometimes we seemed to be in Cranford, greeting our visionary friends; sometimes we

were back in Knutsford again, looking at the houses of the people we had known in the

44 Other readers expressed similar reactions: for instance, the enthusiastic reviewer for the Examiner wrote that Cranford “has…the art to interest you as by something of your own experience, a reality you have actually met with” (195-6, emphasis added), while David Masson, in an 1865 article on Gaskell for Macmillan’s Magazine, notes that “[e]veryone who ever read Cranford, knows the inhabitants of that little sleepy town as well as if he had been in the habit of paying visits there for years” (515). 52

fact rather than in the fancy. And just as one sometimes sees traces of another place and

time still showing in the streets of some new and busy town, so every here and there

seemed isolated signs and tokens of the visionary familiar city as it has been raised by the

genius of its founder. (xv-xvi)

Ritchie’s continuous, seemingly unavoidable slippage between Gaskell’s textual geography and

England’s physical geography during her tour of Knutsford, suggests just how thoroughly

Gaskell’s national locale had imprinted itself onto both Ritchie’s psyche and the nation’s landscape. This impression is inadvertently confirmed a bit later in the Preface when, sketching

Gaskell’s biography, Ritchie mistakenly writes that Gaskell was “married from her aunt’s house at Cranford” rather than Knutsford (xvi). In this slip, Gaskell’s fiction has seemingly replaced both her own and Knutsford’s reality, a replacement that hints at the fictionalization and cultural commodification of England taking place in the nineteenth century.

IV. Domesticating the Regional: North and South and The Life of

Charlotte Brontë

The idea that fiction can replace—indeed, displace—reality is an idea Gaskell actively explores in her next novel, North and South. Returning to the genre of industrial fiction, Gaskell examines how nineteenth-century fictions—or, in this case, stereotypes—of North and South, urban and rural, working-class and middle-class, have replaced the realities of actual places (and people) in the public’s imagination. For the most part this novel is concerned with breaking down these stereotypes in order to reveal mutual dependence and facilitate understanding and sympathy—the fact that “we have all of us one human heart” (NS 419)—much as she had sought to do in Mary Barton. However, unlike Mary Barton, which is so tightly focused on Manchester and its working-class inhabitants that it appears to exclude the rest of the nation and, for many 53 readers, exacerbate social and geographical differences, North and South attempts a more balanced approach, expanding its field of vision to take in the whole of the nation by having us follow its middle-class protagonist, Margaret Hale, as she moves from her aunt’s fashionable home in London to live with her parents, first to her rural childhood home in Helstone (a small, fictional village in England’s New Forest in the South), then to the manufacturing city of Milton-

Northern (another fictionalization of Manchester). In both of the cities, “Margaret exists at a tangent to the society which surrounds her,” allowing Gaskell “to use her as a vehicle, both directly and indirectly, to comment on the limitations of each society, whether it be the harshness of the northern masters or the shallowness of London gentility,” as Sally Shuttleworth points out in her introduction to the work (xiii). Although she “comments on the limitations of each society,” Margaret also comes to appreciate the strengths of each of these places—the energy, innovation, and industriousness of the North and the beauty, tradition, and cultural humanism of the South—and comes to be, in both her person and her actions, a force of mediation, synthesis, and communion between them, bringing southern values North and advocating for northern values when she returns, briefly, to the South.

While national synthesis is the novel’s ultimate goal, much of the narrative is, like Mary

Barton, concerned with reconciling and unifying the classes within the dangerously divided

Milton-Northern. Accordingly, in the process of overcoming her (southern) prejudices about the

North (a place she holds to be cold, dirty, vulgar, fierce, and materialistic), Margaret learns about the struggles and prejudices that both classes face (and hold) and steps in to act as a mediator between them, not only questioning the ideas held by each and putting forward the position of the other, but also introducing the hope that things could be different, better, that social harmony and justice are possible, and, indeed, that “unity may be brought into practice” (NS 120).

Significantly, this hope is symbolized in and conveyed through Margaret’s idyllic accounts of 54 her rural childhood home, Helstone, a place she perpetually longs for and invokes as a desirable alternative to both London and Milton. For instance, in the wake of her cousin’s lavish, rather excessive London wedding, Margaret voices a preference for simpler, more natural and peaceful celebrations, such as would be had in Helstone (11-2); while during a somewhat stifling visit to

Bessy Higgins, a sick factory worker in Milton, she emphasizes Helstone’s fresh air and natural beauty, as well as the liberty to be found amidst its trees and the tranquility to be enjoyed on its commons (100-1). That Margaret’s image of Helstone is one rooted in fiction and feeling rather than fact is made clear when she first describes it to her London suitor, Henry Lennox, as being

“like a village in a poem—in one of Tennyson’s poems” complete with rose-covered cottages and large open greens (12). Yet while we, like the somewhat cynical Lennox, recognize the idealism of Margaret’s description of Helstone, it isn’t until Bessy Higgins and, later, Bessy’s father, Nicholas, begin to speak of moving to the South to escape the strife and struggles faced in the North that she is forced to acknowledge that it is perhaps not quite “as perfect a place” as she has made it out to be (28), particularly for members of the working class: “There’s a deal to bear there,” Margaret admits, “There is very hard bodily labour to be gone through, with very little food to give strength…It’s sometimes in heavy rain, and sometimes in bitter cold. A young person can stand it; but an old man gets racked with rheumatism, and bent and withered before his time; yet he must just work on the same, or else go to the workhouse” (133). Later, when she visits Helstone after living in the North for a few years, Margaret will again be forced to concede that Helstone is not necessarily the best place for her either, and that her idyllic, rose-tinted vision of it is a fiction she has imposed upon it.

And yet, this recognition of the fictionality of the place Margaret calls home does not invalidate the alternatives it enables her (and others) to imagine. Rather, as Robert Dainotto argues, 55

For [Margaret], living in the cold and warlike north, the fantasy of elsewhere remains the

only possible way to preserve, against the collapse of all the symbols of social unity, a

model of justice and peaceful wholesomeness, an ethical exemplum. As the real south is

unveiled as being a rheumatic hell, the ideal one remains a topos offering a perspective of

justice to be realized….The south is, therefore, an ethical model still to be predicated,

with all of Margaret’s missionary zeal, in order to give the society of the north at least an

idea of what is good. This ethical elsewhere, surely, is a raisonnement hypothétique et

conditionnel—as Rousseau would have called it—a “hypothetical reasoning” whose goal

is not to paint facts but to mitigate inequality, injustice, and strife amidst humankind. (83-

Thus Margaret’s idyllic image of her home, although challenged and ultimately divorced from

Helstone’s reality, remains both a rhetorical tool to stimulate change (an “invitation to dialogue” as Dainotto later calls it [97]) and a powerful symbol of the type of community that could be realized in both Milton and England as a whole. Accordingly, it is an image—an ideal—that the text preserves, figuratively within its pages and symbolically in the pressed roses John Thornton, the Milton manufacturer upon whom Margaret has impressed her ideals, collects at Helstone and presents to Margaret when he re-acknowledges his love for her at the end of the novel:

“Do you know these roses?” he said, drawing out his pocket-book, in which were

treasured up some dead flowers.

“No!” she replied, with innocent curiosity. “Did I give them to you?”

“No! Vanity; you did not. You may have worn sister roses very probably.”

She looked at them, wondering for a minute, then she smiled a little as she said—

“They are from Helstone, are they not? I know the deep indentations round the leaves.

Oh! have you been there? When were you there?” 56

“I wanted to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is, even at the worst

time of all, when I had no hope of ever calling her mine.…”

“You must give them to me,” she said, trying to take them out of his hand with

gentle violence.

“Very well. Only you must pay me for them!” (NS 436)

As with Cranford, Gaskell here attempts to preserve Helstone’s singularity—its unique character, found in the readily identifiable “deep indentations round the leaves” of its roses—even as she transforms it into a cultural commodity capable of circulating around and representing the nation.

Specifically given in exchange for Margaret’s hand in marriage here (the “payment” to which

Thornton alludes and a symbolic enactment of the marriage of North and South the novel promotes), the roses become a sentimental souvenir of Helstone and the idyllic South that

Margaret can carry to her (new) home in the industrial North—along with the ideals and values they represent. As such, these flowers effectively replace the “real” Helstone with a reified symbol of Margaret’s idealized Helstone that is also a traditional symbol of England’s national unity.45

Rather remarkably, like Cranford, Helstone came to exist outside the pages of North and

South. In a footnote to a chapter entitled “Ruralism and Provincialism in the Victorian Novel:

North and South” in Hardy’s Geography, Ralph Pite claims that after North and South

“‘Helstone’ becomes a name that means rural England” and offers two examples as evidence:

“Mrs Henry Wood’s The Channings (1862) is set in ‘Helstonleigh’, a rural cathedral city probably modeled on Worcester; in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936), ‘Helston’

(referring to the real Helston between Falmouth and Penzance) is presented as an idyllic, rural

45 The rose became the floral heraldic emblem of England in the fifteenth century when Henry Tudor unseated Richard III as king and ended the War of the Roses, unifying England under his rule; in an analogous act, the marriage of Thornton and Margaret represents the unification of North and South in Gaskell’s novel.

57 place the heroine must leave” (214, fn. 59). However, although provocative in its suggestion of the potential influence of Gaskell’s imagined locale, Pite’s reference to Helstone’s fictional future(s) is less provocative than his recognition of its fictional past in Shirley (1849), Charlotte

Brontë’s only industrial novel and her most determined defense of local and regional personality, independence, and attachment, and it is to the relationship between these works and the women who wrote them that I now turn.

Written after the deaths of her siblings Branwell and Emily, and during Anne’s decline,

Shirley is overtly tied to the landscape of the Brontë family home in Yorkshire and, rather unsurprisingly given the topographic and ethnographic specificity, was the text through which

Brontë was identified as Currer Bell—the pseudonym she had hitherto used to shield her life, her home, and her gender from public scrutiny.46 Shirley is also the text that brought Gaskell and

Brontë together in a personal and professional relationship that would culminate with Gaskell’s

1857 The Life of Charlotte Brontë, a hugely successful work that has been identified as “the most important nineteenth century biography of a woman writer” (Peterson, “Gaskell’s Life” 61) and which remains the most influential (indeed, overshadowing) account of Brontë and her family to date. The relationship between the two authors, particularly as represented through The Life, has garnered much critical attention with accounts of it varying enormously, ranging “from the benign to the malignant,” from “a friendship of tremendous warmth and attachment” to a work of

“self-aggrandizement and misrepresentation,” even “treason”” on the part of Gaskell (Peterson,

“Triangulation” 901). Written with what was likely a blend of affection and opportunism

46 In her biography of Brontë, Gaskell describes the public’s discovery of Currer Bell’s identity as intimately linked to the landscape of Shirley: “the secret so jealously preserved, was oozing out at last. The publication of “Shirley” seemed to fix the conviction that the writer was an inhabitant of the district where the story was laid. And a clever Haworth man, who had…gone to settle in Liverpool, read the novel, and was struck with some of the names of places mentioned, and knew the dialect in which parts of it were written. He became convinced that it was the production of some one in Haworth. But he could not imagine who in that village could have written such a work except Miss Brontë…he divulged his suspicion…in the columns of a Liverpool paper; thus the heart of the mystery came slowly creeping out” (LCB 387). As Gaskell tells it, Brontë was identified by her regional particularities.

(Gaskell was, after all, a remarkably savvy author as Hilary Schor demonstrates in Scheherezade in the Marketplace), Gaskell’s Life exudes a genuine tenderness and nostalgia for its subject even as it re-imagines her in terms that suited Gaskell’s own aesthetic and political aims. Indeed, The

Life celebrates the distinctive, regionally marked personality of Brontë and her home at the same time as it domesticates both, rationalizing and commodifying them in such a manner as to incorporate both into the national whole. North and South, a suggestive precursor to The Life, performs a similar albeit less thorough domesticating of Brontë’s northern regionalism via its allusive, elusive engagement with Shirley. Together North and South and The Life tame the landscape of the North as celebrated by Brontë, effectively subsuming it and her into the English nation as imagined by Gaskell.

When Gaskell began work on North and South in 1853, she was not only familiar with

Shirley, which she (along with the rest of the nation) had read immediately after its publication in

October of 1849, but “dear friend[s]” with its author, whom she had met in July of 1850 (LCB

60).47 Although thoroughly “interested in what [Brontë had] written,” Gaskell was not a wholehearted admirer of her contemporary’s work (Gaskell Letters 116). In a letter to Lady Kay-

Shuttleworth written a few months before she first met Brontë at Shuttleworth’s home, Gaskell mentions her ambivalence towards Brontë’s second novel: “I think I told you that I disliked a good deal in the plot of Shirley, but the expression of her own thoughts in it is so true and brave, that I greatly admire her” (116). Notably, Gaskell had expressed a similar ambivalence towards

Brontë’s previous novel Jane Eyre (1847)—“it is an uncommon book. I don’t know if I like or dislike it. I take the opposite side to the person I am talking with always in order to hear some convincing arguments to clear up my opinions” (57)—and would later openly admit her aversion

47 In fact, as Gaskell was planning her novel for Household Words in the spring of 1853, Brontë came to visit on her way home from London.

59 to Villette’s (1853) strange narrator-heroine in a conversation with Brontë, which she describes in a letter to an unknown recipient—“We talked over the old times…of her going to Brussels; whereupon I said I disliked Lucy Snowe…” (249). In spite of what would become a warm regard and affection for the woman, Gaskell was never particularly at ease with Brontë’s works; precisely what Gaskell disliked about Brontë’s novels (beyond the character of Lucy Snowe and the plot of Shirley) is, however, never explicitly articulated in her extant letters or notes. Yet

Gaskell’s bluntness with Mr Brontë about the finality of “public opinion” regarding his daughter’s “published works” (394) when at work on The Life48 suggests an implicit agreement with that opinion.

In brief, while readers and reviewers widely admired the power, passion, and personal honesty of Brontë’s writing (her “true and brave” “expression of her own thoughts” as it were), they simultaneously complained of a coarseness, vulgarity, and narrowness in her art that was, as

Tim Dolin has shown, inherently linked to her radical defense of both sexual and regional/ethnic peripheries.49 Arguing that Shirley manifests Brontë’s “passionate allegiance to [her] own—to the north and to the woman novelist” (“Fictional Territory” 212)—Dolin shows the novel participating in a “growing tradition of radical northern provincial fiction…actively engaged in producing…a counter-discourse” (200) to that of the metropolitan south which imagines the north as a “strange and uncouth” (to borrow the terms employed in a review of Shirley for the

48 In a letter to Brontë’s friend Ellen Nussey, Gaskell writes of Mr Brontë’s desire for her to read the manuscript of The Professor in order that “I could give the kind of criticism and opinion on it that Mr Brontë was anxious I should give on those published works of hers, on which (I told him) public opinion had already pronounced her fiat, and set her seal” (Gaskell Letters 394).

49 In “Fictional Territory and a Woman’s Place: Regional and Sexual Difference in Shirley” Dolin points out that the typical critical reaction to Jane Eyre “found in it a masculine coarseness and a hoydenish vulgarity”; while Shirley was criticized predominantly for its regional obscenity—its “strange and uncouth” environments and characters— and the narrowness of its scope (201). Reading Shirley as “above all a response to the public’s response to Jane Eyre,” Dolin goes on to argue that in Shirley Brontë explicitly aligns sexual difference with “urban-regional hostility” in order to address and contest both England’s “internal colonialism” of its regions and its “sexual apartheid” (201).

Atlas) ethnic periphery or backwater (Atlas 120). Similarly, Ian Duncan claims, “Brontë vehemently directs the charge of provincial difference back on to London” in Shirley, by

“investing the metropolitan core with the stigmata of locality and lowness” (330):

“cockneys” are represented as ignorant and uncivil, their “southern accent” robbed of its

normative neutrality when channeled through “northern ears.” Yorkshiremen, by contrast,

maintain their own standards of gallantry, sagacity, and courage. Even rioting workers

express not some cockney class ressentiment but an autochthonous truculence: “A yell

followed this demonstration—a rioters’ yell—a North-of-England—a Yorkshire—a

West-Riding—a West-Riding-clothing-district-of-Yorkshire rioters’ yell. You never

heard that sound, reader?” (330-1)

Whether heard or read, the uniquely northern sound of Shirley did not please many Victorian reviewers. Claiming “Currer Bell” must “learn…to sacrifice a little of her Yorkshire roughness to the demands of good taste,” George Lewes notes how the “frequent harshness and rudeness

[of the characters] is something which startles on a first reading, and, on a second, is quite inexplicable” (165). Condemning it as “coarser in texture” than Jane Eyre, Lewes critiques

Shirley for its “over-masculine vigour” (163) and “offensive harshness” (165), both of which are inextricably linked to its northern subject matter and setting. As they had done with Gaskell’s

Mary Barton, a novel which Brontë felt “in some measure anticipated” Shirley “in subject and incident” (Brontë Letters 2: 174), and the “preceding fictions of the Bell [Brontë] family”

(which, although not industrial in subject, are set in wild corners of northern England50), the majority of Brontë’s contemporaries read her second novel as Dolin and Duncan read it: as a fierce assertion of and allegiance to a “wild” and alienated “north-country” utterly at odds with

50Along with Charlotte Brontë/Currer Bell’s Jane Eyre, Emily/Ellis’s Wuthering Heights and Anne/Acton’s Agnes Grey were published in 1847; Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, appeared in 1848. All take place in the North, in neighbourhoods “[r]emote from the towns” where, in one critic’s words, “the people run a rather godless and very uncivilised race” (Atlas 120).

61 and fervently opposed to “southern visions” of civility, community, and nation (Atlas 120).51 In many ways the very qualities Gaskell and the reviewers admired in Brontë’s work—in particular, her intense expression of herself, of her personality, which was regarded as a mark of her genius—are the very same qualities they claimed to dislike in both her and her sisters’ novels— that is, their passionate allegiance to their own, their northern localism and regional attachments, which were read as narrowly solipsistic and fiercely uncivilized, hence wholly unfeminine and un-English.

The seemingly “militant” northern regionalism of the Brontë sisters (Duncan 330), of whom Charlotte remained the sole representative, Anne having died during Shirley’s composition, constituted an implicit threat to Gaskell’s aesthetic efforts to unify the nation by incorporating the local and regional into the national imaginary: not only were the Brontë sisters’ works apparently reinforcing regional divisions, but Charlotte Brontë herself seemed to embrace both her physical and psychological detachment from the nation. Woolf aptly sums up the radical difference of the two writers’ projects in her comparison of their “worlds,” which I cited at the beginning of this chapter. That both Victorian authors recognized the threat Brontë’s regionalist

“tuft of heather” posed to Gaskell’s nationalist vision of “everybody’s world” is suggested in a letter Brontë sent to Gaskell in June of 1853 inviting her to visit at Haworth Parsonage:

51 Of the seventeen reviews on Shirley collected by Miriam Allott in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage there is one notable exception: William Howitt, in his unsigned review for Standard of Freedom, disregards any regional partiality in favor of the novel’s national scope and writes that “Shirley is essentially a story of English life” (133). More recently James Buzard has made a persuasive case regarding Brontë’s attempt to link the local with the national in Shirley: What Brontë tries to do in Shirley is argue that the grounding function of vertical [local, place-specific] identification acquires positive efficacy for the maintenance of a national culture only when it is yoked to an equally strong force of horizontal [ideological, trans-local] identifications, while, on the other hand, horizontal connections—such as common nationality—require the gravity supplied by vertical ones if they are not to dissolve into empty abstractions. (226) However, Buzard concludes that despite arguing for a balance between local and national Shirley ends with a reassertion of the local, suggesting Brontë’s loyalty was first to preserving the local in its distinctiveness.

When you take leave of the domestic circle and turn your back on Plymouth Grove to

come to Haworth, you must do it in the spirit which might sustain you in case you were

setting out on a brief trip to the backwoods of America. Leaving behind your husband,

children, and civilization, you must come out to barbarism, loneliness, and liberty. The

change will perhaps do good, if not too prolonged… (Brontë Letters 3: 172, ellipses in

original)

Juxtaposing her barbarous, lonely home in Yorkshire with Gaskell’s home at Plymouth Grove in

Manchester, which Brontë had described to her publisher George Smith and his wife as a “large, cheerful, airy house” (Brontë Letters 2: 655) filled with “liveliness and gaiety” shortly after her first visit two years before (654), Brontë implies that while the latter might have civility and comfort, happiness and community, it does not have liberty—a luxury only to be found outside the bounds of England’s middle-class community. Brontë’s alignment of Haworth/Yorkshire with the uncultivated, un-English “backwoods of America” deliberately divorces her home from the civilized English nation, which is represented by Gaskell’s “domestic circle.” Moreover, as

Maria Frawley notes, it invites Gaskell “to think of [Brontë’s] region and home…as [a] foreign country”—more precisely, a dangerous foreign country at odds with England (178).

This “jaundiced view of Haworth,” as Juliet Barker has famously described it (qtd. in

Frawley 178), is elaborately promoted by Brontë in her letters which, as Frawley has shown, are filled with self-conscious descriptions that, like those from the invitation to Gaskell, call attention to the remoteness and rudeness of her wild “corner of Yorkshire” (Brontë Letters 2:

72).52 Although she inverts the periphery-core relationship in Shirley, it is clear that Brontë was

“attracted to a notion of her cultural heritage that stressed its inaccessibility and that sought to

52 Noting a few such instances Frawley writes: “In one letter [Brontë] notes the “rough and rude” nature of her “corner of Yorkshire”; in another she describes the “existence of absolute seclusion” that dominates her family’s existence””; in yet another, “she quotes with relish excerpts from a local paper that describe Haworth as “situated amongst the bogs and mountains and until very lately supposed to be in a state of semi-barbarism”” (177-178).

63 identify Yorkshire with a part of Britain oblivious to” and protected from “the processes that were transforming the rest of the nation” (Frawley 178-9). Even when the revelation of her identity inspired, in her words, “[o]ne or two curiosity-hunters” to make their way to Haworth

Parsonage in 1850, Brontë remained convinced that the “rude hills and rugged neighbourhood” of Yorkshire would “form a sufficient barrier to the frequent repetition of such visits”—a barrier she both desired and maintained (Brontë Letters 2: 350). Imagining Yorkshire to be physically, psychologically, and even temporally distinct from the rest of the nation Brontë’s romantic regionalism—her celebration and defense of Yorkshire’s isolation, liberty, and barbarism— challenges the very unity Gaskell sought to engender; moreover, it consciously refuses the values of England’s civilized domestic circle and, in doing so, challenges the domestic values at the heart of the middle-class nation that Gaskell’s works celebrate.

Gaskell first attempts to neutralize the threat of Brontë’s wild regionalism in North and

South. By naming Margaret’s rural Hampshire home “Helstone” Gaskell deliberately puts her second condition-of-England novel in dialogue with Brontë’s regional novel of industrial

Yorkshire; more specifically, Gaskell puts her novel of national synthesis in dialogue with

Shirley’s heroine, Caroline Helstone, a self-proclaimed “Yorkshire girl” who is the novel’s most overt champion of local identifications—the “genius loci” of the West Riding, as Buzard calls her (238). By appropriating Caroline’s surname Gaskell asserts a bond with Brontë even as she subtly domesticates both Caroline’s and Brontë’s passionate northern regionalism and, by extension, the “wild north-country” of Yorkshire by placing her Helstone in the centre of

England’s New Forest in Hampshire, a well-established symbol of the “secure, productive, and tranquil rural Englishness” that had come to represent the nation (Helsinger 8).53 In recasting

53 Regarding the centrality of Hampshire in representations of the rural south Pite notes, “As well as presenting a view of rural life in general…the ruralist tradition within the Victorian provincial novel also celebrated in particular the rural life of Hampshire” (Hardy’s Geography 76). Within Hampshire, New Forest was given particular 64

Margaret’s Helstone as the rather generic symbol of rural England, Gaskell subverts

Brontë’s/Caroline’s assertion of Yorkshire’s/the local’s singularity, replacing the individual and regional identifications produced by such singularity with national identifications produced by a shared cultural symbol—one that notably unifies North and South. At the same time, by forcing

Margaret (and the reader) to recognize the limits and dangers of local (the “real” Helstone) outlooks—signified most vividly by the barbarous “paganism” of Betty Barnes who burns her neighbour’s cat to summon the devil (390)—Gaskell repudiates Brontë’s/Caroline’s strident defense of the local: to avoid backwardness, narrowness, and viciousness, Gaskell implies,

Helstone must open itself to the modernizing forces that are transforming the English nation; indeed, the local must connect to the national or it risks stagnation and, even worse, degeneration.

In The Life, undertaken shortly after North and South was revised for volume publication,54 Gaskell effectively executes this imperative, explicitly connecting Brontë’s isolated, barbarous, and backward home to the civilized English nation. Famously opening with a chapter that “would be more at home in a travel guide” (Frawley 184), Gaskell attaches the landscape around Brontë’s home to the physical and economic landscape of England via the national networks of railway tracks, trade, and industrial expansion she describes:

The Leeds and Bradford railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire; a slow and sluggish

stream, compared to the neighbouring river of Wharfe. Keighley station is on this line of

railway, about a quarter of a mile from the town of the same name. The number of

inhabitants and the importance of Keighley have been very greatly increased during the significance by William Howitt, whose widely popular Rural Life of England (1838) not only imagines the countryside to be emblematic of England, but identifies New Forest as the best preserved instance of traditional rural England.

54 These revisions notably included the addition of the episode with Betty Barnes. For more information on Gaskell’s revisions of North and South, see Angus Easson’s notes on the text in the Oxford edition of the novel.

last twenty years, owing to the rapidly extended market for worsted manufactures, a

branch of industry that mainly employs the factory population of this part of Yorkshire,

which has Bradford for its centre and metropolis. (LCB 53)

As in both Cranford and North and South the railroad in The Life is shown to shrink distances and bring change by connecting the local to the national:55 pressed by speed, space diminishes and regions previously secured by distinct “spatial and temporal coordinates” are, as Duncan explains, “dissolved into an undifferentiated screen for the flow of capital” (325).56 And, like the railway that conducts it, this flow of capital is transformative: as the market for worsted manufacturers extended, Keighley was transformed “from a populous old-fashioned village, into a still more populous and flourishing town” (LCB 53)—a transformation that significantly echoes or reproduces England’s transformation as a nation and metonymically situates Keighley, like

Cranford, as England writ small.

Having firmly situated Keighley along England’s railroad tracks and within England’s economy, Gaskell turns her attention to Haworth, which is located “about four-miles” distant and accessible only by country road (54). Providing careful directions for traveling from Keighley to

Haworth, Gaskell emphasizes the increasing isolation and bleakness of the landscape:

[A]s the road begins to ascend, the vegetation become poorer; it does not flourish, it

merely exists; and, instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs…what crops there

55 In Cranford the railroad, as mentioned, signifies the town’s modernization and facilitates Mary’s visits, thereby connecting the town to the rest of England, literally and imaginatively; in North and South the railroad connects North to South, carrying Margaret from one place to the other, thus, while “North and South may be opposed in various ways…in this newly industrialized world they are readily accessible to each other”; indeed, as Jill Matus writes, “the country is traversed with lines of communication” (qtd. in Scholl 96).

56 In Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture Ann Colley describes the temporal and spatial homogenization effected by the railroad: “The railroad was eventually the means by which time was standardized (in the 1840s to coordinate the various train lines it became necessary to settle upon one agreed upon time). […] Moreover, the train was designed to set straight, unswerving lines across the landscape; it was supposed to regularize the uneven contours of the earth….[T]o lay tracks engineers found it necessary to make the ground even so that the lines would lie flat and secure. In short, the train was built with the hope of ridding time and space of incongruity and variation. It was constructed as if it were supposed to be an inscribed map that orders and classifies the land” (98). 66

are, on the patches of arable land, consist of pale, hungry-looking grey-green oats. […]

All round the horizon there is [a] line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which

they fall only revealing other hills beyond…crowned with wild, bleak moors—grand,

from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the

feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier…

(55)

A long and narrow road winds through the steep village of Haworth eventually reaching its pinnacle and end at Haworth Parsonage, which, rather fittingly, “open[s] onto the fields and moors that lie beyond” (56). Turning her eye on Haworth and its environs Gaskell employs the same ethnographic conventions previously used in Mary Barton, Cranford, and North and South, detailing for her reader the “peculiar force of character”—the “strange eccentricity” and “wild rough heathen ways” (60)—found in Yorkshire’s “remoter districts” (67). Constructing the social and cultural milieu of the Brontë family along the same lines that Brontë herself had—lonely, barbarous, strange, and lawless—Gaskell leads her reader from the familiar, distinctly English town of Keighley to the foreboding, ostensibly foreign wilderness of Haworth. As she does so, however, she traverses the “illimitable barrier” that Brontë had imagined would keep England at bay, effectively opening Haworth up to the very “civilization” Brontë had resisted, rejected.

Gaskell justifies this trespass by emphasizing its necessity to her biographical study: “For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë,” she writes, “it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed”

(60). By stressing the explanatory powers of the Yorkshire environment Gaskell “pays tribute” to

Brontë’s regional identifications (Duncan 331). At the same time, however, this emphasis on the explanatory powers of place implicitly encourages anyone interested in obtaining this “right 67 understanding” of Brontë to follow in her footsteps (which are conveniently made quite easy to follow given the specificity of her directions) and make his or her way to Haworth to become

“acquainted” with the “peculiar” character of the place. In doing so Gaskell implicitly

“transforms Haworth into a place of pilgrimage for the Brontë faithful” (Parker, “Literary

Tourism” 130).

Or perhaps not so implicitly: as Pamela Corpron Parker has shown, Gaskell deliberately

“positions readers as fellow pilgrims” travelling alongside her in The Life, imagining them into the biography (and onto the landscape) in such a manner as to suggest their “bodily presence alongside her own” (130-1). Gaskell writes, for instance, that “[r]ight before the traveller on this road rises Haworth village, he can see it for two miles before he arrives…” (LCB 55) and, “as the visitor stands with his back to the church, ready to enter in at the front door…” (56). While both these descriptions “direct the reader’s gaze and physical location” suggesting his presence in the landscape as Parker notes (“Literary Tourism” 130), by placing the “visitor” (notably, a far more friendly designation than “tourist” or “curiosity-hunter”) on the threshold of Haworth Parsonage

“ready to enter,” Gaskell goes a step beyond imagining him in the landscape to suggesting that his presence there is invited—even welcomed—a suggestion that directly opposes Brontë’s desire to keep individual curiosity-hunters and the civilized English nation at bay.

Yet, welcomed or not, Gaskell’s textual projection rapidly became a corporal reality as a

“flood” of literary tourists invaded Haworth following the publication of The Life (Barker 810).57

In her biography of the Brontës, Juliet Barker describes this deluge along with the local welcome such “visitors” were given:

57 Of The Life’s immediate and immense success Barker writes, “The book created a sensation comparable to the first publication of Jane Eyre. It was seized upon and avidly read by everyone, from London literati to provincial novel readers” (796).

There had been a trickle of tourists ever since the publication of Shirley…; in the wake of

Mrs Gaskell’s powerful and emotive descriptions of the place, this now became a flood.

“Haworth has been inundated with visitors—”, Arthur [Nicholls] wrote to George Smith

a mere two months after the biography had appeared. […] By July the local papers had

begun to comment. “The memoir of this lady is producing quite a revolution in the

ancient village of Haworth,” declared the Bradford Observer and the Leeds Intelligencer.

Scarcely a day passes that a score of visitors do not make a pilgrimage to the spot

where Charlotte Brontë lived and died. The quiet rural inns, where refreshment

for man & beast, of a plain but excellent kind, used to be obtained at a fabulously

low price, have raised their tariff to an equality with the most noted hotels in the

pathways of tourists, & if they advance their charges much more they will rank

among the most costly houses of entertainment in the Queen’s dominions.

Tourists walking up the main street were confronted with the first examples of Brontë

souvenirs: even the chemist was cashing in on the trend, displaying photographs of

Patrick Brontë, the church and the parsonage for sale in his windows. (810-11)

As with the “flow of capital” that had swept through Keighley transforming it into one of

England’s flourishing manufacturing towns, the flood of tourists (along with their eagerly spent capital) began to transform Haworth into one of the nation’s most popular commercial attractions.58 In opening the floodgates as it were, The Life “placed Haworth firmly on the map” of England (810)—physically, economically, and culturally—effectively domesticating Brontë’s wild “tuft of heather” by commodifying (or at least facilitating the commodification of) its regional barbarism. Notably, by 1868, a railway line traversing the four miles between Haworth

58 Haworth remains a popular tourist destination to this day, with the Parsonage Museum attracting over 100,000 visitors a year (Stoneman, “The Brontë Myth” 219).

69 and Keighley/England was in place, physically completing that which The Life had imaginatively effected: Haworth was now part of the national landscape, the national economy, and the national culture.59

The domestication and incorporation of the wild and rugged North into the civilized and commercial nation is not, however, all Gaskell’s biography achieves: having set out to “make the world…honour the woman as much as they have admired the writer” (Gaskell Letters 345),

Gaskell attempts to domesticate Brontë as well. Her methods of doing so are, however, the reverse of her methods of domesticating Haworth: where Gaskell sought to incorporate

Yorkshire’s regional landscape and culture into England by highlighting its distinctiveness thus encouraging tourism, she endeavored to tame Brontë’s character and genius by emphasizing her quintessential femininity thus encouraging idealization. Linda Peterson, Pamela Corpron Parker, and Alison Kershaw (among others) have all written about Gaskell’s emphasis on Brontë’s femininity in The Life, their articles showing how Gaskell defends Brontë against the accusations of “coarseness” and “unwomanliness” levied at her by the critics, by highlighting her “feminine nature and domestic prowess” including, among numerous other examples, her “good breeding,” her physical “daintiness,” her “sensible management of her father’s house,” and her “tender nursing of her sisters and their ageing housekeeper, Tabby” (Parker, “Constructing Identity” 74).

Collectively, these descriptions produce the image of a dutiful daughter, a loyal and devoted sister, a responsible housekeeper, and a delicate (even fragile) woman: all stereotypes of

Victorian feminine ideals. By celebrating Brontë as a selfless paragon of the home—an “angel in the house” as it were—Gaskell’s biography transforms Brontë into a middle-class national ideal,

59 Ironically, albeit unsurprisingly, by the beginning of the twentieth century tourists were complaining that Haworth was no longer the “straggling hamlet…surrounded and shut out from the world by a wilderness of barren heath” (qtd. in Barker 811) they expected (and hoped) it to be for, as the above quotation from Barker suggests, the Brontë tourist industry rapidly transformed the Haworth of Brontë’s life to a sort of “Brontëland” where museums, tea shops, bars, and gift shops were established to cater to (and capitalize on) the steady stream of Brontë enthusiasts who, following in Gaskell’s footsteps, came to “understand” the Brontës.

70 a transformation that necessarily effaces many of the realities of Brontë’s personality that fail to accord with this ideal.60

However, even if Gaskell manages to make her audience “honour [Brontë] as a woman, separate from her character of authoress,” she still had to contend with the distinctive “character of the authoress” and the regional genius that so openly defined it (Gaskell Letters 347).

Gaskell’s approach to doing so in The Life is twofold: first, by locating Brontë so entirely within her environment and showing her developing and cultivating her artistic genius within what

Gaskell emphasizes as the isolated and “perpetually unhealthy” world of Haworth (LCB 481),

Gaskell questions the health (even sanity) of a conception of genius that looks so entirely inward.

For instance, when describing Brontë’s juvenilia, Gaskell writes: “While her description of any real occurrence is, as we have seen, homely, graphic, and forcible, when she gives way to her powers of creation, her fancy and her language alike run riot, sometimes to the very borders of apparent delirium” (119). This creative madness as it were,61 is explained as the natural outcome of her environment:

Life in an isolated village, or a lonely country-house, presents many little occurrences

which sink into the mind of childhood, there to be brooded over…children leading a

secluded life are often thoughtful and dreamy: the impressions made upon them by the

world without…are sometimes magnified by them into things so deeply significant as to

be almost supernatural. (120)

60 Gaskell’s elisions in The Life are well known: while her decision to concentrate on the domestic rather than the professional side of Brontë’s life is openly stated, other decisions are performed more covertly, including both her suppression of Brontë’s feelings for the married M. Heger and her careful selection and abridgment of Brontë’s letters to Ellen Nussey. Where the letters suggest “a stronger and wittier personality than…Gaskell’s overall picture presents” (Shelston, Introduction 34), the relationship suggests a passionate sexuality and transgressive morality, all traits that challenge Gaskell’s portrait of ideal Victorian femininity.

61 That Gaskell saw Brontë’s juvenilia as bordering on madness is made clear in a letter addressed to George Smith in which she describes the “extraordinary” packet of “\indescribably/ fine writing” she obtained at Haworth: “they are the wildest & most incoherent things…all purporting to be written, or addressed to some member of the Wellesley family. They give one the idea of creative power carried to the verge of insanity” (Gaskell Letters 398).

Such productions may hint at budding “genius” but it is a solipsistic and riotous (thus threatening) form of genius that reinforces the unhealthy—wild, unstable, and uncivil—nature of regional isolation.62 Having thus presented the reader with this disturbing picture of regional genius, Gaskell goes on to domesticate it the same way she domesticates Brontë’s personality: by recasting it in the service of female duty. Writes Linda Peterson: “Gaskell tames the concept of genius by [frequently] associating it with other virtues—as in the “brave genius” with which

Brontë faced her sisters’ ill-health [and] her father’s blindness….Similarly, in a letter to

Charlotte Froude, Gaskell describes Brontë’s “strong feeling of responsibility for the Gift, which she has [been] given”” (“Gaskell’s Life” 66). By associating genius with both domestic duty and social responsibility, Gaskell reconciles the “difficult to…reconcile” “duties” of author and woman, redefining genius as a talent “meant for the use and service of others,” as she writes in

The Life (334). In so doing, Gaskell interprets both Brontë’s life and work through “the narrow lens of traditional femininity” (Parker, “Constructing Identity” 77)—a lens that, like the ideal of the “angel in the house,” effaces the particular force of character of the woman behind the lens and transforms her into a representative or ideal, here of the female artist. And it is this figure that Gaskell commits to public memory.

By depicting Brontë as both “a product of an environment characterized as remote and exotic, even primitive” (Frawley176) and an exemplary woman committed to an ideal of domestic and female duty, Gaskell’s Life arguably “did more than any other single text” to create the “myth” of Brontë as heroic and tragic figure that “continues to dominate our vision” of her

(d’Albertis, “Bookmaking” 1). On the one hand, the image of Brontë Gaskell puts forward in The

Life is both a celebration of and a tribute to Brontë’s regionalism: in Frawley’s words, Gaskell

62 Examining Gaskell’s emphasis on health and morbidity in The Life, Deidre d’Albertis argues that Gaskell repeatedly shows both Brontë’s proclivity to “morbid and acute mental suffering” and her “exquisite physical vulnerability” to be mutually constitutive products of a self-absorbed solitude—a “lack of external engagement beyond the confines of the self”(“Bookmaking” 5-6).

“see[s] [Brontë] as she had asked to be seen” (176). On the other, The Life is an attempt to tame

Brontë’s wild regionalism—to domesticate her and her home—revealing what Deirdre d’Albertis describes as “a desire to memorialize [Brontë’s] life, and in so doing, to subordinate [Brontë] as the subject of her text” (“Bookmaking” 2). Rather like the pressed roses Thornton gives to

Margaret, Gaskell gives the public an image of Brontë that, even as it ostensibly preserves her singularity, does so in such a manner as to tame her: rationalizing and commodifying, thus subduing and suppressing her distinctive characteristics in order to incorporate her and her world into the English nation as Gaskell imagined it.

V. Altogether English: Inventing “Mrs Gaskell”

Something of a similar fate awaited Gaskell after her own death as friends, reviewers, readers, and critics of the nineteenth and twentieth century went on to subdue and unify what she famously called her many “Mes” (Gaskell Letters 108)63 in such a manner as to transform the controversial, “stubborn, prejudiced, over-whelming,…erratic,” sympathetic, excitable, inscrutable, and innovative woman they represented (Uglow 604) into the charmingly domestic

“Mrs Gaskell”—the most “conventional and soothing of the major novelists” (Schor,

Scheherezade 4). The desire to contain Gaskell in and read her work through the lens of her matronly appellation suggests not only a desire to repress the disparate (and potentially subversive) aspects of her identity and works but also a desire for the domestic comfort, stability, and tradition the designation signifies. Indeed, as “Mrs Gaskell,” Gaskell implicitly becomes a

63 Of her many “Mes” Gaskell writes: I have a great number, and that’s the plague. One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christian—(only people call her socialist and communist), another of my mes is a wife and mother, and highly delighted at the delight of everyone else in the house… Now that’s my ‘social’ self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience whh is pleased on its own account. How am I to reconcile all these warring members? I try to drown myself (my first self,) by saying it’s Wm who is to decide on all these things…only that does not quite do. (Gaskell Letters 108)

73 paragon and a protector of the home and hearth and, by metonymic extension, of the nation.

Consequently, one may read her domesticity as an essential Englishness. David Masson gives expression to this perspective in his notice of Gaskell’s death for the December 1865 issue of

Macmillan’s Magazine: after praising her works for the “enjoyment” they take “in all the pleasures of home and family” (515), he extravagantly concludes that

It is impossible to determine now the exact position which Mrs Gaskell will hold

ultimately amongst English writers of our day. It will be a high one, if not amongst the

highest….Within the last few years we have lost greater English writers than Mrs.

Gaskell; we have greater still left; but we have none so purely and altogether English in

the worthiest sense of that noble word. (517-8, emphasis added)

Essentially, Gaskell’s literary efforts to imagine a national whole through the commodification and domestication of its regional distinctions were visited back upon her as she herself—her name, her person, her life, her work—was sublimated into a national ideal of respectable middle- class domesticity that ostensibly effaced both her agency and her personality.

We cannot, however, read this fate as either ironic or unwelcomed. For starters, “Mrs” was not a title posthumously ascribed: Gaskell herself elected to publish under the designation for the first time with the novel that followed The Life, Sylvia’s Lovers, a decision d’Albertis suggests was “integral not only to Gaskell’s imagination of herself and of others, but also to negotiation of the marketplace in which her writing circulated” (“Life and Letters” 24). Rather than the “concession to convention” critics have often described it as being (24), then, Gaskell’s adoption of “Mrs” was a mode of invoking that convention and drawing on its cultural influence and authority. Indeed, by advertising herself as “Mrs Gaskell” (or rather, by allowing herself to be advertised as such) Gaskell emphasized the respectability of her texts, which, in light of the

“firestorm of criticism” (24) some of them had provoked upon their initial (anonymous) 74 publication—including, of course, Mary Barton—seems a canny reworking of literary history: such controversial works would, in the future, be read as the inherently respectable works of the charming, domestic, civilized, and “altogether English” Mrs Gaskell—a reading which would implicitly tame and nationalize their settings and subjects anew.

At the same time, Gaskell’s matronly appellation seems to have been a means of removing herself from her texts: “Mrs Gaskell,” a signature she rarely, if ever, used in her personal correspondence (preferring E. C. Gaskell), was a public persona, not a personal identity, one she was happy to leave to her public to construct. Indeed, Gaskell’s cheerful willingness to have her public persona shaped by her public is wryly suggested in a letter written a few months before her death: “I HATE photographs & moreover disapprove of biographies of living people. I always let people invent mine, & have often learnt some curious particulars about myself from what they choose to say” (Gaskell Letters 761). Although she had leapt at the opportunity to write a biography of Brontë, was herself an avid reader of biographies, and eagerly gossiped and speculated about her literary peers (actively following the news, reviews, and rumors that surrounded them),64 Gaskell actively refused to “direct her historians” (Pite, General Introduction xi) or her contemporaries with regard to herself, “consciously resist[ing] what she saw as “the impertinent custom” of biographical criticism” (d’Albertis, “Life and Letters” 12) by rejecting requests for interviews and repeatedly refusing to correct biographical claims—even when

“laughably inaccurate” (Gaskell Letters 762). Gaskell also habitually requested “correspondents destroy her letters” and enjoined both her children and her professional associates to discretion

(d’Albertis, “Life and Letters” 12), effectively effacing as much of her private personality from

64 As Parker succinctly points out, “Gaskell was not only lionized herself, but a great lionizer” (“Literary Tourism” 132). Not only did she collect signatures and seek meetings with many of the most prominent authors of her day, but she “frequently sought information about other literary figures” including, most famously, George Eliot, whose identity and gender she “obsessively sought to uncover” (134).

75 public record as possible.65 It seems, in fact, that Gaskell did everything she could to ensure it was the charming, matronly, somewhat “bland” Mrs Gaskell (Pite, General Introduction xi), not the controversial, independent, often irreverent E. C. Gaskell, who would survive her. In doing so she sought to protect the idea of domestic reconciliation and unity put forward in her works from the contradictions and divisions inherent in the self.66 In an oft-quoted 1850 letter to Eliza

Fox, Gaskell writes of the need to put one’s work and one’s duty before oneself:

If Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is no doubt of that—

and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual Life; but I do believe we all

have some appointed work to do, whh no one else can do so well; Wh. is our work; what

we have to do in advancing the Kingdom of God; and that first we must find out what we

are sent into the world to do, and define it and make it clear to ourselves, (that is the hard

part) and then forget ourselves in our work, and our work in the End we ought to strive to

bring about. (Gaskell Letters 107)

In her work and in her public life, Gaskell attempts to execute this imperative as she subdues personal, local, and regional character in order to “bring about” a common national culture that embraces, and is embraced, by everyone—North and South, urban and rural, working class and middle class, men and women.

65 Gaskell’s requests were not unheeded and, as d’Albertis writes, ““Her mother’s wish that no biography should be written of her” certainly governed Meta Gaskell’s decision late in life to burn most of the letters in her possession” (“Life and Letters” 12). The letters that survived were collected in a single volume by J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard in 1967.

66 In his General Introduction to the Lives of Victorian Literary Figures series, Ralph Pite makes a similar point when he claims that Gaskell’s tendency to “play the part expected of her” in public—“sweet, kindly, womanly,” even “recklessly bland”—was “more a positive choice” than a passive or negative one: “she adopted a style in response to her sense of where she was placed and how she was placed. And she was obeying her principles as well. A more forthright manner would not only have been self-defeating, it would have worked against reconciliation— the sort of reconciliation at least that Gaskell wanted to bring about” (General Introduction, xi-xii).

Chapter 2

Solid and Substantial: Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire and the Influence of English Real(ist) Estate

Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,—solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of. And these books are just as English as a beef-steak.

~Nathaniel Hawthorne, from a private letter (1860)

[M[y hope to rise had always been built on writing novels, and at last by writing novels I had risen.

~Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883)

I. Solid and Substantial: Trollope’s Fictional Foundation

Proudly surveying his property in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), Anthony

Trollope’s “old friend” (556), the Archdeacon Grantly, attempts to explain to his favorite son,

Major Henry Grantly, the value of land—or rather, of landownership:

“I wonder people are so fond of land,” said the major.

“It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is

about the only thing that can’t fly away. And then, you see, land gives so much more than

the rent. It gives position and influence and political power, to say nothing about the

game.…”

The archdeacon was striving to teach a great lesson to his son when he thus spoke

of the pleasure which a man feels when he stands upon his own ground. He was bidding 77

his son to understand how great was the position of an heir to a landed property, and how

small the position of a man depending on what Dr Grantly himself would have called a

scratch income—an income made up of a few odds and ends, a share or two in this

company and a share or two in that, a slight venture in foreign stocks, a small mortgage

and such like convenient but uninfluential driblets. A man, no doubt, may live at Pau on

driblets; may pay his way and drink his bottles of cheap wine, and enjoy life after a

fashion…. But—as it seemed to the archdeacon—when there was a choice between this

kind of thing, and fox-covers at Plumstead, and a seat among the magistrates of

Barsetshire, and an establishment full of horses, beeves, swine, carriages, and hayricks, a

man…ought not to be very long in choosing. (605-6)

Contrasting the permanence, respectability, and tangibility of landed property with its “horses, beeves,” and “seat among the magistrates,” with the implicit impermanence, contemptuousness, and intangibility of a “scratch income” made up of insubstantial “driblets,” Dr Grantly undertakes to persuade his son to invest in a future on (and of) English soil. In the worldly archdeacon’s rather conservative formulation, such an investment would give his son more than simply an income, it would give him a “position”: a social standing and identity as “solid and substantial”—as real—as the ground itself (Hawthorne qtd. in A 144). By implicit contrast, a life and identity founded on an income of stocks and shares would be “slight”: enjoyable perhaps, but as fluid, ephemeral, and, eventually, as empty, as cheap bottles of wine.67 The comfort of standing on one’s own ground then, is the comfort of possessing, in addition to a stable full of horses, a full and stable sense of self: an identity that is solid and substantial enough to make an impression on—that is, to influence and shape—the world around one.

67 For examples of such emptiness we need only look to the myriad of speculators and stockbrokers who populate Trollope’s fiction (particularly his later work)—the Dobbs Broughtons, Augustus Melmottes, and Ferdinand Lopezes—all of whom attempt to substantiate their fraudulent (and often foreign) identities by buying or marrying into the landed property of the English gentry. 78

Such comfort, such stability and social standing, were precisely what Trollope himself had longed for as a young man, in part, as the early chapters of An Autobiography (1883) suggest, because such security was precisely what his father, Thomas Anthony Trollope, failed to provide for his family. Although Trollope’s father had hoped, like the archdeacon, to give his children the stability, status, and respectability—the “position”—that came with landed property, the long lease he signed for a farm just outside of London proved “ruinous” (A 3), ultimately destabilizing rather than securing the family’s social standing and becoming, in Trollope’s censorious summation, “the grave of all my father’s hopes, ambition, and prosperity, the cause of my mother’s sufferings, and those of her children, and perhaps the director of her destiny and of ours” (2). In their ruin the family’s position, like their farmhouse, “crept downwards,” until both seemed indivisible from “the dung-heaps” (11): where Trollope had before been a “young gentleman” (2), the second son of a moderately successful London barrister of genteel origins and promising prospects, he was now a “wretched farmer’s boy, reeking from a dunghill,” one who possessed no right “to sit next to the sons of peers” or “the sons of big tradesmen” at school

(12). Thus tainted by his family’s social and economic decline, Trollope found himself “despised by all [his] companions” and was denied “all social intercourse” with them (11). Keenly felt, the effects of this early social alienation were never fully overcome (hence the vividness with which he recalls them nearly fifty years later in An Autobiography) and, as many critics have noted, the experience deeply influenced both his life and his writing.68 Most immediately, his “absolute

68 Trollope himself acknowledges the emotional and psychological impact of his youthful experience of ostracization early in An Autobiography: “I was never able to overcome—or even to attempt to overcome—the absolute isolation of my school position. Of the cricket-ground, or racket-court, I was allowed to know nothing. And yet I longed for these things with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a coveting which was almost mean…. Something of the disgrace of my school-days has clung to me all through life” (16-17). In Novels Behind Glass, Andrew Miller has astutely linked Trollope’s later love of hunting—“the strength of which seemed inexplicable even to the writer himself”—to this desire for acceptance into the “social world from which he had felt estranged as a child”: the English gentleman’s world of sports and camaraderie, social authority and community (173-4). David Skilton similarly links the trauma of Trollope’s youth to the “dramas of exclusion and belonging” that he claims make up “the stuff of his [Trollope’s] fiction, found not only in his story patterns but in his narrator’s relationship with his ideal reader” with whom he asserts such camaraderie (“Trollope” 217). More broadly, George 79 isolation” (16) gave rise to his now-famous pastime of “castle-building,” that youthful precursor to Trollope’s adult practice of novel writing. Significantly, it was this later practice which would, in turn, prove to be the means by which he would rise as he wrote himself out of the unstable dunghills of his youth and into a social position as solid and substantial—as comfortable, stable, and “firmly built”—as the one he had longed for and imagined (42).

The substance of Trollope’s achievement, of his rise and success, has frequently been measured in terms of the quantity of both his fictional output and his financial income for, as

Christina Crosby notes, Trollope excelled “not only in producing an extraordinary number of books, but in selling his books to his publishers for substantial sums” (“Addictive Realism” 251).

Writing of the “commercial exchange[s]” between novelists, publishers, and the public in

Fictions of State, Patrick Brantlinger claims such exchanges transform “literary make-believe” into “pounds, shillings, and pence” (163) in a manner akin to “the Faustian, alchemical paradox” whereby “something thoroughly substantial” (money) is created “out of nothing” (fiction) (41).

Trollope’s remarkable mastery of this alchemy is rather infamously exhibited in the list of volumes published and “total sums received” with which he exuberantly concludes his autobiography (A 363-4). Despite (somewhat disingenuously) downplaying his authorial accomplishments throughout An Autobiography, Trollope’s pride and satisfaction at having written “more in amount than…any other living English author” (362) and having “made by literature something near £70,000” (a result he twice describes as “comfortable, but not splendid”

[107, 365]), are unmistakable.69 Yet, it is more than merely the long publication list and large

Levine claims that “Trollope’s “disgrace” played almost as important a part in his writing career as Dickens’s did in his,” manifesting itself in the “very anti-romantic texture of his novels”—in, that is, his realism (Realist Imagination 190).

69 Over the course of his career Trollope would write forty-seven novels, nine volumes of stories and sketches, and nine works of non-fiction; whether he truly had written more than any other living English author is unlikely given that Margaret Oliphant had, at the time of Trollope’s death, already published at least fifty-eight novels (and would 80 amount of money of which he is proud. By opening An Autobiography with the above story of his childhood losses and disgrace and concluding it with an account ledger of his worldly gains and successes, Trollope effectively channels the narrative arc of “a favorite Victorian genre”: that middle-class fairytale of “the self-made man” (Brantlinger 164). In doing so, Trollope identifies himself as both the hero and the author, both the subject and the creator of An

Autobiography and of his own life, and reveals how, through novel writing, he was able to “be known as somebody” (A 107). More specifically, he was able to achieve the position that enabled him “to be Anthony Trollope,” that exemplary-yet-exceptional Victorian gentleman and author whose solid and substantial fiction and person would come to make a lasting impression on readers and acquaintances alike (107, emphasis added).70 The pride at the end of An

Autobiography then, is not the vulgar or materialist pride of a man obsessed with money as it was so often read throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the pride of a man who knew himself to have performed the ultimate act of alchemy in making not something out of nothing, but someone.71

go on to publish many many more). In 2005 his total earnings would have been equal to about 3.5 million US dollars according to Crosby (“Addictive Realism” 253).

70 In his biography of Trollope, N. John Hall records numerous descriptions of the author that collectively attest to the memorable “impression” he made. For instance: Frederick Locker-Lampson testified that Trollope’s “ordinary tones had the penetrative capacity of two people quarrelling, and his voice would ring through and through you, and shake the windows in their frames, while all the time he was most amiably disposed towards you under his waistcoat. To me his viso sciolto and bluff geniality were very attractive, and so were his gusty denunciations.” Wilkie Collins, calling Trollope “as good and staunch a friend as ever lived,” admitted nevertheless that “his immeasurable energies had a bewildering effect on my invalid constitution. To me, he was an incarnate gale of wind. He blew off my hat; he turned my umbrella inside out.”…Another [friend], writing in 1873, described a visit by Trollope: “The bell would peal, the knocker began thundering, the door be burst open, and the next minute the house be filled with the big resonate voice inquiring who was at home….He was a big man…His manner was bluff, hearty, and genial, and he possessed to the full the great charm of giving his undivided attention to the matter in hand. He was always enthusiastic and energetic in whatever he did….[A]ny subject, was attacked by him with equal energy…” (391) Regarding the similarly formidable impression made by his fiction, see sections 2 and 3 of this chapter.

71 As Audrey Jaffe points out, Trollope deliberately “represents the development of his career as a transformation of the insubstantial into the substantial” in An Autobiography as he turns his father’s failure(s) into his own success (Dreams 27).

Such alchemical achievements are at the core of this chapter’s argument for, in producing

“so much more” than money—in producing the confident, robust, energetic author and man,

“Anthony Trollope”—Trollope’s novels take on the productive power of landed property as described in the scene from The Last Chronicle which opened this chapter. Much like Dr

Grantly’s property, it was, as Walter M. Kendrick points out, “Trollope’s novels that…enabled him to live a happy and comfortable real life” (15, emphasis added)—a life of substance, gentility, and security that was, in Trollope’s assessment, “exactly the life which my thoughts and aspirations had marked out,” exactly the life he had longed for during his unstable and uncomfortable youth (A 168). And yet, I would suggest, this life and identity were not founded simply on the fact of his having produced a number of popular novels but, more pointedly, on his having produced an imaginary plot of land upon which he could comfortably stand: that “dear”

English shire of Barset of which he became the founder, proprietor, and beloved “chronicler”

(154). In penning the six novels that would come to collectively make up the Chronicles of

Barsetshire (1855-1867),72 his earliest and most enduring successes with the British reading public, Trollope built a literary landscape that came to secure for him not only some very real

“rent” but also the “position and influence and…power” that Dr Grantly attributes to landed property alone. Such economic and social gains effectively enabled Trollope to become, in

Robert Tracy’s words, “an English gentleman among English gentlemen” (Later Novels 8). The imagined geography of Barset became, in effect, Trollope’s fictional-real property,73 what I am

72 The Chronicles include: The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1860), The Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). When first contemplating re-publishing these titles as a series, Trollope did not initially include The Small House at Allington, due perhaps to its primary action being set just outside the bounds of Barsetshire. However, Lily Dale’s story was included at the publisher’s urging when the Chronicles were eventually printed as a collection in 1878 (Hall, Trollope 435).

73 English common law uses the term “real property” rather than the American “real estate” to refer to freehold land and the improvements made to it by human efforts, i.e., buildings, ponds, roads, etc. (Law & Martin, “Real Property” and “Hereditament”). I will be using these terms interchangeably throughout this chapter.

82 calling his realist estate, not only allowing him to purchase real English real estate, but giving him a real position in England—one that was both respectable and remarkable. Accordingly, when we read of Dr Grantly’s proud survey of his property as he looks out at Plumstead’s pleasant fox-covers and abundant acres, we can see the shadow of Trollope who, in the sprawling success of The Last Chronicle, is also proudly surveying his property—both real and imaginary.74

This use of land—even fictional land—to produce and secure a respected position within

English society implicitly gestures towards Trollope’s conservative reverence for and belief in the nation’s traditional hierarchies and established systems, values which both Trollope and the

Chronicles have long been read as endorsing. For instance, in The Country and the City

Raymond Williams briefly reads Trollope’s Barsetshire novels as being entirely “at ease with schemes of inheritance…and the successful propertied marriage” (174). For Williams, this ease is inherently (and unforgivably) expressive of a profoundly conservative vision of England that unquestioningly accepts and reproduces the dominant structures of feeling Williams is committed to interrogating and exposing, which in turn explains his abrupt dismissal of Trollope from any further critical consideration.75 D. A. Miller’s influential chapter on Barchester Towers in The Novel and the Police, “The Novel as Usual,” engages more fully (although perhaps no less disparagingly) with this ideological “ease,” arguing that Trollope’s fiction actively maintains

74 Notably, as he bids farewell to Barsetshire at the end of The Last Chronicle, Trollope emphasizes its tangibility— the fact that he (and presumably the reader) sees, hears, and feels it as firmly as if it were real: “And now, if the reader will allow me to seize him affectionately by the arm, we will together take our last farewell of Barset and of the towers of Barsetshire….[T]o me Barset has been a real country, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are known to my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps…” (861). This reality will be discussed at length in section 3, below.

75 Specifically, Williams uses Trollope as a foil to George Eliot who, despite what Williams sees as her subjective imposition onto the rural, is decidedly not at ease with these traditions; in this comparison Trollope is little more than a straw-man and his works aren’t given any sustained attention. In turn, this categorical dismissal set the tone for future critical treatment (or rather, the lack thereof) of Trollope, an author who fell out of critical favour in the middle of the twentieth century (a fall echoed in his almost complete disappearance from university syllabi) and has only recently begun to be given sustained and serious critical attention. 83 the conservative values of the status quo by inducing an ease—or, in Miller’s terms, a

“boredom”—in readers that ultimately bores those values into them—a Foucauldian argument of subject formation to which I will later return (145). More recent scholarship has, however, begun to look beyond Trollope’s “deep” (that is, undeniable, firmly maintained) conservatism, emphasizing instead what the editors to the 2011 Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope describe as his paradoxical “bimodality” (Dever and Niles 2). Such readings reveal Britain’s great domestic novelist to be thoroughly cosmopolitan (Turner, Goodlad); his ostensibly conventional realism to be radically experimental and sensational (Tracy, Bourne Taylor, Jones); and his seemingly unambiguous heteronormativity to be, at times, quite queer (Flint). While such approaches have certainly imbued Trollope criticism with a new vitality, opening his works up to fresh avenues of study, there remains embedded in all of them a sense that Trollope is an author who, for all his contradictions and complexity, remains committed to what Amanda Anderson describes as the “embedded ethos” (“Trollope’s Modernity” 515) of “traditional forms of life” and power (531); an ethos which includes, of course, a belief in the productive and political power of landownership.

In keeping with this recent trend in Trollope scholarship, my own reading of Trollope’s fictional foundation embraces such bimodality as I examine what I understand to be a central vein of it: his simultaneous endorsement and appropriation of one of England’s most established and powerful systems—landed property. The paradoxical nature of this perspective is, to my mind, at the core of Trollope’s literary and literal achievement for, in the very process of writing himself into his genteel, conservative position, Trollope implicitly overturns the very traditions he overtly endorses in that, as already suggested, he achieves his property along with its coterminous identity not through the traditional means of inheritance, marriage, or political 84 appointment, but through his own individual, imaginative industry.76 That this industry is so decisively delineated—even celebrated—within the pages of An Autobiography suggests just how thoroughly Trollope identified with the determinately liberal individualist entrepreneurial ethos of England’s increasingly influential middle class.77 Accordingly, like Lauren M. E.

Goodlad who, in her examination of Trollope’s “two-party foreign policy” (“Foreign Policy”

439), reads this identification with middle-class entrepreneurialism as existing “in productive tension” (447) with his conservative “reverence for [the] established hierarchies” of the landed- gentry (444), my own reading sees these two value systems as paradoxically—yet productively—entwined. However, where Goodlad divides these opposing ideological perspectives (which she identifies as “rootedness” and “cosmopolitism”) between Trollope’s

English chronicles and his foreign travel writings of the same period, I believe that we see their entwinement specifically within the Chronicles of Barsetshire as these works produce a fictional foundation that legitimates and substantiates the middle-class values with which Trollope identified (individualism, entrepreneurialism, class mobility) via their imaginative re- appropriation of England’s established structures (land and the position it confers).

That said, it is the contention of this chapter that Trollope’s early entrepreneurial efforts did more than merely produce a solid and substantial position for himself: they produced one for

76 In fact, all three of these “traditional” means of securing a position proved to be obstacles that Trollope had to overcome in order to secure his respectability and gentility: already discussed was the social decline and taint of dunghills he inherited from his father; however, his marriage brought nothing better in terms of connections or stability as his wife’s father was accused of embezzlement by the bank he worked for and fled to the continent to escape imprisonment, while his “political appointment” to a position in the postal service (secured through his mother) was, at least initially, characterized by failure and shame, eventually leading to his self-elected exile to Ireland.

77 While he celebrates hard work throughout An Autobiography, the beginning of chapter 15 offers perhaps the most famous example of this by delineating the “system of task-work” to which he held himself (118), including his commitment to early hours (“It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5:30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy….By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast” [271]) and his measured production (“It had…become my custom…to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour” [272]), which together enabled him “to have always on hand…one or two or even three unpublished novels in my desk beside me” (273).

85 his middle-class readers as well. By selling these readers imaginative and emotive stakes in the

“little bit of England” he had “created” (Trollope qtd. in Hall, Trollope 435) and “added to the

English counties” (A 154), Trollope provided them with a piece of English real(ist) estate upon which they too could comfortably and confidently stand. Barset became, in short, a literary landscape that, at the height of its popularity, would help to firmly establish England’s middle- class readers’ position, power, and identity within the nation that they themselves were increasingly shaping. Thus, even as they endorse the traditional power of landownership,

Trollope’s Barsetshire novels imaginatively extend that power to England’s landless middle- class, effectively creating something—or rather, a substantial community of someones—out of nothing.

Keeping in mind Trollope’s own alchemical production of self—of position—through his fictional property, I will, in the following sections, consider how Trollope became both a representative of and a voice for the English middle-class who, as they came to recognize themselves within his novel world, found the real(ist) property and values necessary to establish and substantiate their own social and political position within the English nation.

II. Great Impressions: Reflective Fantasies and Realist Reform in Early

Barsetshire

In his influential essay, “Anthony Trollope,” written shortly after the elder author’s death in 1882,78 Henry James remarks that The Warden “made a great impression” on the reading public when it was first published in 1855 (98). Although influenced by his knowledge of the

Chronicles’ (and Trollope’s) subsequent popularity, James’s language, whether intended or not,

78 Trollope died on December 6, 1882; James’s essay was written in July of 1883 and published the New York-based Century Magazine; it was later included in James’s volume of essays, Partial Portraits (1888). 86 suggests how deeply, how tangibly, Trollope’s Barchester novels would come to affect and influence—to impress—their readers. Certainly, the six novels that would come to be known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire were, as Andrew Sanders asserts, “to prove [Trollope’s] most steady and lasting successes with his growing reading public” and they remain among his most well-known works today (13). Of the titles that make up this series, the first three—The Warden

(1855), Barchester Towers (1857), and Doctor Thorne (1858)—established Trollope as a successful author, prompting his return from Ireland and earning him the social position and genteel acceptance he had so long desired; the following three—Framley Parsonage (1860), The

Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)—launched Trollope into national fame and fortune, giving him enough “rent” and “position and influence and…power” to establish him as “almost a national institution,” as he was dubbed by the

National Review (“Voice” 167). Collectively, these novels secured Trollope’s position not only as “one of the most sought after serial novelists” of the 1860s (Turner, “Literary Life” 9) whose readership was estimated as being in the “millions” (National Review, “Voice” 167) but, even more prominently, as “the voice of the English middle class” (Smalley 166)—allowing him to make “a great impression” indeed.

While a discussion of each of the chronicles in turn would reveal their individual contributions to this achievement, such an undertaking is unnecessary for the aims of this chapter; instead, I will be focusing primarily on The Warden, Barchester Towers, and Framley

Parsonage. The Warden, as the first of the Barsetshire Chronicles, warrants particular attention: not only did it introduce the literary landscape that would become Trollope’s fictional-real property, effectively giving him a position from which to speak, but it also established the nature and values of the voice with which he would speak (and to which readers would listen) in so much of his subsequent fiction. Its sequel, Barchester Towers, confirmed Trollope’s position by 87 imbuing his realist property with a breadth and substance that seems to surpass the pages of the novel and enter the realm of the real—an impression the subsequent chronicles would continue to intensify. The fourth novel in the series and Trollope’s first serial publication, Framley

Parsonage, expanded Trollope’s audience exponentially, increasing his influence and the influence of his fiction and encouraging his readers to invest in both his realist estate and the firmly middle-class position, identity, and values it established.

That said, despite becoming one of Victorian England’s most popular and influential novelists, Trollope’s success was neither immediate nor intuitive. In fact, as is made clear in An

Autobiography, it took Trollope more than a decade of serious writing to find what he describes as his “proper line”—a line that appealed to both his own principles (and talents) and the public’s preferences (85). Yet, in many ways it was his early failures that enabled him to find this proper line. So, briefly, what didn’t work? Having achieved both professional success in his postal career and personal success in his love life while residing in Ireland,79 it was, perhaps, only natural that Trollope’s earliest attempts at authorship also looked to Ireland for their subject and setting; England, after all, had not been kind to him in his youth. Accordingly, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848) were the first titles to which the name Anthony Trollope was affixed. Unfortunately these “good Irish stor[ies]” did not fare very well in England where they were published (A 76), making it “evident that [English] readers

[did] not like novels on Irish subjects”—as the publisher of the second title would politely inform

Trollope after its failure (Colburn qtd. in A 79). The failure of his third novel, La Vendée (1850), a tale of Revolutionary France, prompted a similar warning “against [the] writing [of] historical

79 Having worked in for the Post Office in London for seven years without achieving any professional distinction or personal satisfaction, Trollope applied for the position of postal surveyor in Ireland hoping to escape what he describes as his “wretched” life in London (A 60). Given the position (in his account, in order to get rid of him), he relocated to Dublin in 1841, a move he calls “the first good fortune of my life” (59); while there he met his future wife, Rose Heseltine, and achieved professional distinction for his work as a dedicated and tireless surveyor.

88 novels” (A 80).80 Dissuaded from pursuing such unprofitable “lines” of writing (at least for the time being81), Trollope spent the next few years trying his hand at a variety of genres— newspaper editorials, dramas, even guidebooks—but all proved to be at least as unsuccessful as his first three novels.82 Then, as the now-famous story goes, in 1851 he was forced to abandon writing as he took up a “special job of official work” surveying and mapping rural postal routes in parts of Ireland and England (87). The object of this work was, as he recalls, “to create a postal network which should catch all recipients of letters” (88), a suggestive turn of phrase since, despite being too busy to write, Trollope’s daily rides over the English countryside would ultimately manage to “catch” more readers of letters than either the post office or Trollope had perhaps expected, for it was during this time that Trollope “conceived the story of The

Warden,—from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester…was the central site”

(92). And, in 1853, when he finally had the time to do so, Trollope set about writing what would become the first of his “thoroughly English” novels (143).

Admittedly, The Warden was not initially a bestseller; it was, however, the first of

Trollope’s works to achieve any degree of success. In his words,

The novel-reading world did not go mad about The Warden; but I soon felt that it had not

failed as the others had failed. There were notices of it in the press, and I could discover

80 Of these failures Trollope writes: “When my historical novel failed, as completely as had its predecessors, the two Irish novels, I began to ask myself whether, after all, that was my proper line” (A 85, emphasis added). 81 That Trollope returned to writing about Ireland and Irish subjects after winning over the English public reveals not merely how much he valued his time there, but also his sustained interest in experimenting with his writing, his public, and his popularity, the culmination of which is, arguably, his peculiar experiments with anonymity undertaken at the height of his popularity with his decidedly unEnglish works, Nina Balatka (1867) and Linda Tressel (1868). On these experiments, see Robert Tracy’s contribution to “Trollopians Reduces,” “Trollope Re(t)read,” and Donald Smalley’s introduction to Trollope: The Critical Heritage.

82 Indeed, neither his play, A Noble Jilt, nor his Irish guidebook made it into print during his lifetime; he reworked the plot of the former in the love story between Alice Vavasor and John Grey in Can You Forgive Her? and winkingly alludes to the play in The Eustace Diamonds (1873) when he mentions that Mrs. Carbuncle attended a performance of it. In 1923, edited and with a preface by Michael Sadleir, the play was published. The Irish guidebook remains, to the best of my knowledge, unpublished.

that people around me knew that I had written a book.…At the end of 1855 I received a

cheque for £9, 8s. 8d., which was the first money I had ever earned by literary work….At

the end of 1856 I received another sum of £10, 15s. 1d. (98)

As modest as they were,83 The Warden’s public and pecuniary “success” proved enough for

Trollope to feel he had finally found his proper line of writing and, in a chapter of An

Autobiography pointedly titled “My First Success,” he notes The Warden had “a merit of its own,—a merit by my own perception of which I was enabled to see wherein lay whatever strength I did possess” (98). In his assessment of these strengths, Trollope focuses exclusively on his style of writing (which he claims “was good”) and his delineation of characters (who he believes are “clearly drawn”) (98); however, given that the failure of his three previous novels is ascribed to their foreign subjects and settings (both temporal and geographic), not their style and characters, it would seem that at least a portion of The Warden’s success was due to its contemporary English characters and locale.84 That the vast majority of the forty-three novels that followed The Warden (including the five that immediately followed it85) would also focus on modern English characters and/or settings suggests that he was to some degree aware of this factor in the making of his first “success.” George Murray Smith, the successful publisher and founder of the Cornhill Magazine (1860-1975), certainly credited the modern English elements of Trollope’s fiction when accounting for its appeal, pointedly requesting “an English tale, on

English life” from Trollope to act as the lead serial for the inaugural issue of his magazine in

83 “Indeed,” Trollope wryly remarks in An Autobiography, “as regarded remuneration for the time, stone-breaking would have done better” (98).

84 That said, in later reviews of his works, Trollope’s critics would frequently praise the good, pure Englishness of both his writing style and his favoured characters; even when they condemned him for slovenliness because of his ostensibly un-artful style, they maintained that the clarity, pleasantness, familiarity, and frankness of his novels— indeed, their lack of art—marked them (and him) as being thoroughly English in “taste, sentiment, and conviction” (National Review, “Voice” 167).

85 These works include: Barchester Towers, The New Zealander (written between 1855 and 1856 but not published until 1972), The Three Clerks (1858), Doctor Thorne, and The Bertrams (1859).

1859 (A 142). That Smith was wise to make this request is clear from the incredible success of both the Cornhill and Framley Parsonage, the “thoroughly English” story Trollope wrote for

86 him (143). Victorian England, it would seem, enjoyed reading about Victorian England—real or imagined—and, the “quiet” cathedral town of Barchester, first introduced in the slim volume of The Warden (W 1), seemed at once to be both: a fiction of England that “reflected” the real world through its imaginative lens.

Arguably then, Trollope’s proper line was one that catered to his English readers’ “taste” for what James classifies as “emotions of recognition”87 (“Trollope” 113): that is, un- experimental (in James’s terms, “safe” [91]) fiction within which readers could comfortably see themselves and their world reflected “in all the most credible and supposable ways” (92). In

James’s assessment, Trollope

never wearied of the pre-established round of English customs—never needed a respite or

a change—was content to go on indefinitely watching the life that surrounded him, and

holding up his mirror to it. Into this mirror the public, at first especially, grew very fond

of looking—for it saw itself reflected in all the most credible and supposable ways, with

the curiosity that people feel to know how they look when they are represented, ‘just as

they are’, by a painter who does not desire to put them into an attitude, to drape them for

an effect, to arrange his light and his accessories. This exact and on the whole becoming

image, projected upon a surface without a strong intrinsic tone, constitutes mainly the

entertainment that Trollope offered his readers. (92)

86 On Framley Parsonage’s appearance in the Cornhill and the extraordinary success of both, see section 4, below.

87 In his final assessment of Trollope, James distinguishes between “two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: a taste for emotions of surprise, and the taste for emotions of recognition” (“Trollope” 113), a division that parallels the widely accepted critical division between sensation fiction and realist fiction. Trollope also asserts this division in his Autobiography, aligning himself with the latter in his oft-quoted phrase “I am realistic” (A 227). Notably, he maintains that “a good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree,” implicitly suggesting that his own “good” fiction is perhaps not as straightforwardly “realistic” as James holds it to be (227).

Attributing to Trollope a fondness for English subjects that appears, at least initially, to have belonged more to his readers than himself, James maintains that Trollope’s skill and success lay entirely in his ability to accurately and neutrally transcribe or reflect England’s reality. Yet where

James obliquely dismisses such straightforward mimesis as relatively inartistic and fundamentally inconsequential, I would suggest that this apparent artlessness and transparency was to become the very means through which the English reading public entered Trollope’s fictional world—his “glass case”—of Barsetshire (to borrow Hawthorne’s evocative metaphor), effectively inverting inside and outside as Barsetshire came to appear more familiar and secure, more solid and substantial than England itself. Indeed, the seemingly reflective surface of

Trollope’s realism imbues his fictional world with a reality that came to rival reality itself and, in doing so, came to influence England’s reality in unprecedented ways.

At first glance, however, this reflection might not appear to be quite as straightforward as

James’s mirror-analogy suggests for, although first inspired by the real cathedral town of

Salisbury,88 Barchester is, in The Warden’s opening paragraph, promptly severed from any real- world counterpart and left to float above the English landscape, much like one of Trollope’s castles in the air:

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the

cathedral town of -----; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name it Wells or Salisbury,

Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was

intended…. Let us presume that Barchester is a quiet town in the West of England, more

remarkable for the beauty of its cathedral and the antiquity of its monuments than for any

commercial prosperity. (1)

88 As Trollope writes, while surveying and mapping rural postal routes in southwestern England, “I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering there on a midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I conceived the story of The Warden…” (A 92). 92

Here, not only are we asked to dissociate Barchester from any real place in the interest of keeping it impersonal (i.e., detached from his contemporaries’ real lives), but the impression that

Barchester hovers just outside England’s present-day reality is then enhanced by its apparent distance from the “commercial prosperity” that had transformed the rest of the nation by the

1850s. At first glance Barchester appears to be an idyllic and imaginary—and thus a comfortable, confined, stable, and safe—landscape of the recent, somewhat imaginary past, where peace, “beauty,” and “antiquity” reign supreme. Add to this impression the fact that

Barchester’s very existence depends on our collective agreement to “presume” that it does in fact exist (“Let us presume that Barchester is…”), and Barchester comes to seem rather more ethereal than not. However, much like Trollope’s childhood “efforts in architecture” (A 42), Barchester and its inhabitants exist in clear view of the ground below and, as the novel unfolds, we realize that its aerial world is firmly grounded, not merely by the principles of reality that govern his work and the mundane details of everyday life that pervade it (both of which give Trollope’s novels so much of their “weight”),89 but by its explicit attachment to Victorian England. Indeed, for all its idyllic “antiquity” and its lack of “commercial prosperity,” Barchester is very clearly a town inhabited by Victorians, aware (and afraid) of the changing world around them, struggling to hold on to the past even as they prepare for the future. Sanders confirms this attachment, noting Barchester “is no sleepy hangover from Jane Austen’s England. It is linked by a burgeoning railway system to the main centres of economic power and political influence; its postal services run with due efficiency and expedition; the press, both local and national, render it attentive to what London says and what London does” (42). Contemporary and connected,

89 In his well-known description of his youthful habit of castle-building Trollope emphasizes his meticulous, almost plodding, fidelity to the principles of reality: “For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced,—nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable” (A 42-3). Thus, while “in the air” these castles were as “firmly built” and bound to reality as any real-world dwelling (42).

Barchester appeared to Trollope’s original readers, “emphatically and recognizably a modern

England” (42), making it a place where “something personal” was decidedly “intended”—a place, that is, where they could see themselves and their world “just as they [were].” By highlighting both Barchester’s distance from and intimacy with England’s present reality,

Trollope creates a literary landscape that deliberately presents itself as both a fiction and a reality, a fantasy and a reflection—or rather, a fiction of reality, a fantasy of reflection.

To focus for the moment on the reflection rather than the fantasy (knowing that the one will inevitably lead back to the other, that they are, in fact, indivisible), the contemporary setting and the topicality of The Warden’s central drama offer perhaps the most obvious evidence of its attachment to and reflection of England’s present-day reality. Noting that The Warden is set “in almost the exact years it was written,” 1851-1853, David Skilton has identified a number of real- life scandals and debates that inform the novel’s crisis about potentially misappropriated church funds.90 My interest is less in the specifics of these scandals than in the reality and contemporaneity of them for, by building The Warden’s plot out of recent headlines, Trollope deliberately inserts his aerial world into the social and political debates that were raging across the English nation as he wrote, making it clear he was not just writing for but of and up to the present.91 Over the course of his career, such intense topicality would become one of his most prominent hallmarks (a part of his “proper line” as it were), differentiating him from his contemporaries who generally “set their fictions in the decades of their childhood and youth”

90 Skilton writes: “One of the scandals of the day was the enjoyment by the cathedral chapter of Rochester of revenues originally pertaining to the scholars of the cathedral school”; additionally, “while [Trollope] was engaged on The Warden, the not dissimilar case of Dulwich College came before the Charity Commissioners; but the cause célèbre of the forties and fifties was that of the Hospital of St Cross at Winchester,” where the Reverend Francis North, the fifth Earl of Guilford, was holding multiple livings (the legality of which was doubtful) and appropriating for personal use funds that should have been applied to the charitable purposes of the hospital (Introduction xiii).

91 Although written and set between 1852 and 1853, The Warden was not published until 1855, rendering the “few years since” of the opening more numerous than it seems was intended (W 1). Indeed, had the novel been published the year it was finished, the end of the work would have effectively caught up to the present.

(Skilton, “Trollope” 211) and prompting the influential nineteenth-century critic, Richard Holt

Hutton’s Jamesian-like conclusion that Trollope’s novels “picture the society of our day with a fidelity with which society has never been pictured before in the history of the world”

(“Trollope” 508). And indeed, from newspaper headlines and fashion trends to political debates and popular gossip, Trollope’s fiction was built out of the “stuff” of the present, the everyday, the real.92 Yet, even as they reflect or “picture the society of our day,” Trollope’s novels also reflect on that society, voicing opinions, making arguments, offering advice, and generally weighing in on the issues, the reality at hand. The Warden, in doing so, offers more than simply

“[k]een observation[s] of public affairs” (Spectator, “Warden” 32, emphasis added), it deliberately positions Trollope as a new voice to be heard in the national debates about the condition of England, one whose opinions came across like observations and whose fiction was read as reality.

That a new, ostensibly neutral, realistic voice was needed in the mid-century condition- of-England debates is emphasized through The Warden’s satirical representation of three of the most prominent and influential participants in these debates: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and The Times newspaper. Transparently caricaturized as Dr. Pessimist Anticant, Mr. Popular

Sentiment, and The Jupiter respectively, these popular, powerful, persuasive, and well- established voices are each found to be problematic and wanting in turn: where Dr. Pessimist

Anticant/Carlyle’s views are shown to be too retrogressive and cynical, Mr. Popular

Sentiment/Dickens’s are found to be too extravagant and overdrawn, and The Jupiter/Times’s too imperious and sententious. Maintaining that the “Poor public” is often “misled” by the rhetorical bombast, mawkishness, and sanctimonious indignation of such voices (W 204), the national

92 Although Trollope’s overt contemporaneity set his realism apart from that of other Victorian realists, it aligned his fiction with rather than against the sensation fiction of the 1860s (for more on the opposition between realism and sensation fiction see footnote 88). Moreover, the fact that the frisson of sensation fiction was in part derived from its up-to-datedness is suggestive when thinking about Trollope’s fiction, which arguably caused its own sort of sensation vis-à-vis its familiarity and contemporaneity. 95 agenda of each is shown in turn to be too extreme, too prejudiced, too artificial, and too overbearing to suit any “real”-world application. So extreme are these voices that The Warden’s

“strong reformer,” John Bold, whose indiscriminate “passion [for]…the reform of all abuses” sets the novel’s central drama in motion (15), comes to realize that as “delightful” as it would have been for both his ego and social status to have his cause “backed by the Jupiter and written up by two of the most popular authors of the day” (201), their depictions of his future father in- law (the novel’s titular warden) are fundamentally “unjust” (202). Despite Bold’s withdrawal from the “investigation” into the warden on these grounds, however, The Jupiter, having decided the small-scale example of allegedly misappropriated church funds in Barchester is a great

“injustice” (90) to be held on par with the most extreme cases of church corruption and “moral indifference” ever seen in England (91), publishes an incendiary article that rouses the indignation of both Anticant and Sentiment, who go on to publish their own scathing and condemnatory pieces about Mr Harding.93

Yet when compared to the “open-handed, just-minded” man whose love of church music and lack of worldliness secure him the affection and respect of all who know him (including both

John Bold and the reader), the depictions of Mr Harding produced by these influential voices seem not only unjust but, more troublingly, fundamentally incapable of engaging with the complex, morally ambiguous reality of the situation we find him in (6). Although Mr Harding’s position as warden is not wholly without reproach—after all, not only is his appointment to the position surrounded in some “Scandal” given that his eldest daughter married the Bishop’s son shortly before he received it (2), but it is left undetermined as to whether he as warden is “legally

93 Anticant condemns Mr Harding in a cant-filled pamphlet on Modern Charity, holding him up as an example of all that is wrong with the world today while accusing him of being a gluttonous clergyman who “swallows the bread prepared…for these impoverished carders of wool” and “indifferently” performs his duty as their clergyman (W 199). Sentiment, in his popular new serial novel, The Almshouse, transparently casts Mr Harding as a “demon” who keeps the charitable inmates of the hospital he runs in a perpetual state of starvation while he lives in the lap of luxury, a story that deliberately plays on the sentimental heartstrings of the masses who read it (207).

96 and distinctly entitled to the proceeds of the property” he oversees (233)—he is in no way “the corrupt caricature of reformist rhetoric” that these national voices make him out to be (Goodlad,

“Foreign Policy” 442). Far from it: given his generosity, benevolence, and compassion in his role as warden as well as in all other roles (father, friend, clergyman), his dedication to his work, his distress over the possibility that he is appropriating property he is not entitled to, and his decision to quietly resign rather than risk being in the wrong, it is clear that the unworldly Mr Harding is, as Jane Nardin claims, “the moral centre” of The Warden and that he does far more good than harm in his position as warden (qtd. in Goodlad, “Foreign Policy” 442).94 The punitive reform demanded by a public brought to outrage through the extreme, reductive voices of The Jupiter,

Anticant, and Sentiment is thus shown to be both excessive and harmful, destructive of the very compassion and consideration they claim to be fighting for. To ensure readers don’t miss this point, Trollope makes it clear that not only does such “reform” result in the national condemnation of a good man, but it also leaves the very bedesmen it ostensibly aimed to help with less than they had before (as they lose both the additional money Mr Harding supplied them out of his own pocket as well as the company of the kindly Mr Harding himself). Our undeniable recognition of the inadequacy, imprudence, and influence of these voices, then, reveals not only the power of the press (newspapers, novels, and pamphlets) to effect change for better or for worse, but, given this power, the desperate need for a new national voice, one that is more moderate, more reasonable, more realistic, and thus more honest and capable than those that currently speak (or write): the voice, in other words, of “Anthony Trollope.”

94 In fact, Nardin claims that Mr Harding is “the moral centre of the Barsetshire novels” (qtd. in Goodlad, “Foreign Policy” 442) and, certainly, his death in The Last Chronicle imbues this book with a finality, a closure, not found in the earlier chronicles.

Although Trollope’s discrediting of these other national voices may itself have been somewhat extreme,95 motivated as it was by a desire to secure a readership and a reputation, the moderate, middling voice and position he created for himself in the process seems to be anything but. Classifying Trollope as an author who facilitates compromise within a “compromised world” (Realistic Imagination 189), George Levine maintains that “the Trollopian voice is designed to induce trust” in its readers through its commitment to realism and its refusal of extremes—political as well as aesthetic (185). In The Warden, Trollope induces this trust most clearly by mediating between the liberal desire for reform and the conservative devotion to tradition, positions which are represented by John Bold and the Archdeacon Grantly, respectively. Thus, even as he admires Bold’s “patriotic endeavours to mend mankind,” his idealism and his “energy” for reform, he makes it clear that Bold is too quick to judge the “old customs” as “evil” and too confident in the benefits of change (W 15); at the same time, although he sympathizes with Grantly’s defense of church institutions and traditions (which he likens to an “ancient forest” of “beautiful” oak trees that have provided “much good fruit”), he also recognizes the “fungi” and “useless” “dead branches” that “now disfigure” them (58).

Simultaneously defending and critiquing the positions and ambitions of both men, Trollope reveals his own inherently bimodal position, his desire, that is, for tradition and progress, constancy and change, stability and reform. Indeed, when preparing his Autobiography a quarter century later, he would famously describe himself as “an advanced, but still a conservative

Liberal,” a political position that he regarded “not only as…possible but as…rational and consistent” (A 291).

95 Trollope’s critics certainly thought so and these “touches of satire” were generally considered to have been “in very bad taste” (Examiner, “Warden” 31). While critical of Trollope’s “caricatures and burlesques of living writers,” the fact that nearly every reviewer felt the need to mention them (and could so readily identify their real-world counterparts) suggests that they achieved their purpose: it seems no one missed his exposure of their failings (31).

To accommodate this middling position Trollope refuses the either/or logic that inflexibly advocates either static preservation or radical transformation—indeed, that pits these

Conservative and Liberal values against each other. He instead presents readers with a vision of moderate reform that simultaneously preserves and reshapes, reflects and reforms the traditions and establishments of the past to meet the demands and realities of the present.96 For example, early in The Warden we are told of some necessary changes implemented in the execution of

John Hiram’s will after the disappearance of wool-carding from Barchester (retired wool-carders being the tradesmen Hiram had set up his alms-house to care for):

Wool-carding in Barchester there was no longer any; so the bishop, dean, and warden,

who took it in turn to put in the old men, generally appointed some hangers-on of their

own; worn-out gardeners, decrepit grave-diggers, or octogenarian sextons, who

thankfully received a comfortable lodging and one shilling and fourpence a day such

being the stipend to which, under the will of John Hiram, they were declared to be

entitled. Formerly, indeed—that is, till within some fifty years of the present time—they

received but sixpence a day, and their breakfast and dinner was found them at a common

table by the warden, such an arrangement being in stricter conformity with the absolute

working of old Hiram’s will: but this was thought to be inconvenient, and to suit the

tastes of neither warden nor bedesmen, and the daily one shilling and fourpence was

substituted with the common consent of all parties… (W 3-4)

Here we see how “reforms” are quietly enacted by “common consent” both as they are needed

(as in the case of the replacement of wool-carders with “hangers-on”) and desired (as in the case of the replacement of common meals with an increased stipend). This democratic and

96 As Goodlad points out in “Trollopian “Foreign Policy,”” there is, in this desire for moderation, for preservation and improvement, an echo of Edmund Burke’s position in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): “A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard.…Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution” (qtd. in Goodlad 444). 99 evolutionary process of reform effectively ensures that Hiram’s Hospital continues as a charitable institution for Barchester’s “superannuated” workers (3), thus preserving the spirit

(and substance) of its tradition. At the same time, it ensures that this tradition evolves to encompass present realities, thus imbuing both its changes and those realities with the security, stability, and legitimacy of old forms. By synthesizing the conservative and liberal positions in this way, The Warden subtly delineates the emergence of a comfortably moderate middle position—one that appears capable of supporting the desire for continuity and change, old and new, tradition and reform, and thus one that appealed to those modern, middle-class readers who, like Trollope, found themselves caught between the two extremes as they sought both the legitimacy, stability, and authority of the old and the opportunity, flexibility, and possibility of the new.

Discussing the relationship between conservatism and liberalism in Trollope’s second series, the Palliser novels (1865-1880),97 William A. Cohen demonstrates how “both the public and private plots produce a mildly progressive perhaps even a “liberal” vision of ni-ni conflict, proposing that a form of flexible accommodation permits a degree of change within the social and political orders” (47).98 This “mildly progressive…vision” is, however, kept in check by its embeddedness within a “deeper and more thoroughly entrenched conservative advocacy for preserving established structures of power” (47). Although Cohen ultimately reads Trollope’s fiction as more conservative than liberal, he suggests that this “exquisite combination of

97 The Palliser novels, overlapped with the Chronicles of Barsetshire in publication and plotlines, and its central characters—Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser—first appear in The Small House at Allington in which Plantagenet contemplates running off with Lady Dumbello, formerly Griselda Grantly, Archdeacon Grantly’s daughter. Although this series leaves Barsetshire behind, it continues to make occasional references to that “dear county” and its inhabitants, incorporating them into the network of national politics with which it is concerned (A 154). The series includes Can You Forgive Her? (1865), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876), and The Duke’s Children (1880).

98 As Cohen explains, Roland Barthes uses the ni-ni (“neither-nor”) principle in Mythologies to describe when “two apparently opposed alternatives establish and naturalize a world of possibilities in narrowly conceived, highly constrained terms” (45).

100 conservatism and progress”(Trollope qtd. in Cohen 47) promotes an idea of modernity as “a form of flexible accommodation” that preserves social order and tradition while advancing by means of “consent, adjustment, and propriety” (Cohen 53). As the above example from The Warden suggests, this vision of non-disruptive social change—of “modernization”—is as much a part of the Barsetshire Chronicles as it is of the Palliser novels, despite the fact that the former is typically read as the more conservative and backward-looking of the two series. Certainly, throughout the Barsetshire series Trollope would produce countless such instances of flexible accommodation, repeatedly dramatizing and negotiating the emergence of this modern, middling ideological position and, in doing so, giving increasing shape and substance to it.99

Collectively, these moments of flexible accommodation, of synthesis, produce the effect of a dynamic-yet-stable world that is continually changing or evolving even as it remains familiar and known—an effect that the six novels’ unprecedented relationship to one another would only intensify. Indeed, such steady-change is built into the very structure of the series genre itself as new characters, settings, and plotlines are continually introduced into a pre- existent, old world or “reality.” That this world—in this case, Barchester, its inhabitants, its politics, and its environs—becomes increasingly firm, increasingly real, with each appearance is, in a manner of speaking, the substance of Trollope’s success. Hence, while The Warden produced, in the words of the Leader, “a good and solid foundation” (“Warden” 36) from which

99 Within the individual novels such social and political synthesis most frequently (and obviously) takes the form of marriage, specifically marriages in which a member of the landed-gentry marries someone without land or position: Frank Gresham and Mary Thorne in Doctor Thorne, Lord Lufton and Lucy Roberts in Framley Parsonage, Major Grantly and Grace Crawley in The Last Chronicle, for instance. In each of these relationships the old is blended with the new—old bloodlines, positions, and properties with new money, politics, and/or values—not to reanimate the old or legitimate the new, but to create a new position somewhere between the two that is at once stable and dynamic, conservative and liberal. Thus, when we encounter Frank Gresham in Framley Parsonage, a year after his marriage to Mary Throne, we find he is a far more active, engaged, and responsible land-owner than his father, Mr Gresham of Greshamsbury, had been, and he is busy making improvements for his tenants, running for political office, and living moderately, despite his wealth. Indeed, where Frank’s father and mother (the haughty Lady Arabella de Courcy) exemplify aristocratic selfishness and enervation and are, consequently, at risk of losing their property and position, Frank and Mary embody middle-class moderation and industriousness and are the force that save and improve the Gresham family property and position. 101 the need for and values of a new, middling national voice and position could be announced,

Barchester Towers and the series that followed built that foundation, voice, and position into a solid and substantial reality, one that ultimately came to exist outside the pages of these novels.

III. As if Art Were Life: Sequels, Series, and Real Fiction

In her essay on “Trollope’s Barsetshire Series” in The Cambridge Companion to Anthony

Trollope, Mary Poovey explains how the novel series, a “generic innovation” of the mid-

Victorian period (31), seems, more than any other mode of realism to date, to transform the novel from a detached (albeit, influential) object of entertainment and/or instruction into a “living thing,” as vital and as real as life itself (James qtd. in Poovey 42). Precisely how the series form achieves this life will be discussed momentarily; the more immediate point, however, is that in doing so, in achieving its own acknowledged vitality, the realist novel series—rather, Trollope’s novel series—effectively “detache[s] itself from its bondage to the real,” from holding its mirror up to life, and attempts not merely to reflect reality as James claims, but to “catch up” to and become reality, as Kendrick argues in The Novel Machine (5).100 The implication of such an achievement is an essential equivalence between Trollope’s fiction and reality wherein England’s reality stands as much a chance of following or reflecting the form and nature of Trollope’s “real fiction,” as his fiction does the reality. This is not in any way to suggest that Trollope’s readers ever forget they are reading a book and begin naively mistaking his fiction for their reality; but

100 In The Novel Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope Kendrick argues that Trollope, aware of “the equal realities of the reader’s real and the writer’s represented world” (4), struggles to keep the latter in check because, to allow writing to represent its own reality (thus “making itself its own subject”), is to destroy realism and risk having writing supplant reality (5). Instead, Trollope’s writing “is artfully devoted to making itself disappear as writing, the better to make reality appear as reality,” Crosby, explaining Kenderick, writes (“Addictive Realism” 253); in doing so, it places “the real world in a position of permanent priority”—the existing subject writing is perpetually representing (Kenderick 5). Yet, in “disavow[ing] its specificity as writing” (in effacing itself as such) (Crosby, “Addictive Realism” 254), Trollope’s fiction transgressively asserts its equivalence to reality and, having “disentangled themselves from the romance of writing,” Trollope’s novels, Kenderick maintains, “stand forth triumphantly transparent, life itself” (85).

102 rather, that his fiction seems to achieve a life or reality of its own, one connected to but always separate from (always floating over) reality, and that this fiction-based reality comes to appear— indeed, comes to be—so real and so substantial that it begins to produce reactions, to have consequences, to, that is, shape realities in the real world.

Peter Melville Logan’s discussion of Victorian realism in “George Eliot and the Fetish of

Realism” is particularly useful here. Positing realism as a fetish—a thing created by humans that assumes, through the meaning humans imbue it with, its own reality that is then taken for “an embodiment of truth” (40)—Logan claims that “the dream of mid-Victorian realism” is “for representation to change the thing it represents” (42, emphasis added). In other words, realism

(the authors of realism) wants to change the reality it represents. This “transformational power,”

Logan continues, resides in the illusion of the art being alive, “so that realism’s power is premised on a singular as if: the subject is transformed by realist art as if art were life” (43, emphasis added). Readers do not replace reality with fiction; rather, fiction achieves the appearance of an equivalent reality, one that has substance enough to enter into (to impress itself upon) the reality of its readers and affect them, influence them, indeed, transform them—just as life itself does.

That Trollope also credited the appearance of life—credited, that is, his realism—as the means by which his fiction would affect and influence his readers is clear in his enthusiastic response to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s now-famous metaphor for Trollope’s novels, that of the

“glass case,” which I’ve used as an epigraph to this chapter. After transcribing Hawthorne’s comments in full in An Autobiography, Trollope writes:

This was dated early in 1860, and could have had no reference to Framley

Parsonage; but it was as true of that work as of any that I have written. And the criticism,

whether just or unjust, describes with wonderful accuracy the purport that I have ever had 103

in view in my writing. I have always desired to “hew out some lump of the earth,” and to

make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk here among us,—with not more

of excellence, nor with exaggerated baseness,—so that my readers might recognise

human beings like to themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods

or demons. If I could do this, then I thought I might succeed in impregnating the mind of

the novel-reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy; that truth prevails while

falsehood fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure, and sweet, and unselfish; that a

man will be honoured as he is true, and honest, and brave of heart; that things meanly

done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious. (A 145, emphasis

added)

While Trollope goes on to acknowledge that other types of literature (specifically great poetry and imaginative prose) may also influence readers and teach such lessons, he maintains that average readers are more likely to understand, respond to, and thus learn from (be mentally

“impregnated” by) realist fictions precisely because the characters are recognized as real (as

“human beings like to themselves”) and thus may influence readers just as real people do. As

Amanda Anderson points out in her reading of this passage, “the shift in perspective that

Trollope effects with the phrase “just as they do walk here among us” is noteworthy. The reader no longer looks down through glass (that crucial detail is now absent) but shares an eye-level view with characters who inhabit the same plane of existence” (“Modernity” 510, emphasis added). By eliminating the transparent wall Hawthorne’s metaphor (and Henry James’s mirror) erected between his fiction and his readers’ reality, Trollope here claims for his fiction an equivalent vitality or force of life—one capable of impregnating readers, of imbuing them with new ideas and new life, indeed, of changing their lives. Far from setting out to statically reflect his readers’ reality as James claims, or to separate his fiction from reality as Hawthorne suggests, 104

Trollope sets out to (re)shape—to influence, impregnate, and interpellate—both his readers and their reality by integrating his real(ist) fiction with reality itself.

In explaining how the realist novel achieves the appearance of life Logan looks to John

Ruskin’s theory of realism, which, he explains, holds realism’s appearance of reality to be the

“aggregate effect of accumulated details,” the sum of which adds up to more than its individual parts (40). Writes Logan: “through their aggregation, realist particulars take on an illusion of concreteness,” of reality, “that transforms them from representation to an embodiment of truth”

(40). If we accept this proto-Barthesian explanation of realism’s “reality effect,” then Trollope’s

Barsetshire novels, as the first extended novel-series published in English literature, together accumulate more details than any single novel before them.101 And, in doing so, they produce what Poovey describes as “the most vital novelistic “organism””—the most real realist realm—

“British readers had ever seen” (“Barsetshire Series” 43).102 While certainly true that Trollope had not initially planned to produce an entire “chain of novels” (Examiner, “Last Chronicle”

297) about his “dear county” (A 154) as Poovey points out (31),103 Barchester Towers was

101 As Anne Humpherys writes, Trollope “essentially invented” the genre of the novel-series in England when he returned to the world of The Warden in the subsequent Chronicles (443); although previous novelists had casually carried characters and settings from one novel to another (most notably William Makepeace Thackeray, Trollope’s literary idol), such reappearances were generally limited to a second appearance, not given a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth as they were with Trollope. Moreover, Trollope’s Barsetshire is the first fictional landscape to be carried between novels, and, although never acknowledged, almost certainly influenced the creation of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, which, like Barsetshire, gains in focus, substance, and reality, with each subsequent appearance.

102 It is, perhaps, for this reason that two of the nineteenth century’s greatest realists—George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy—were such admirers of Trollope’s fiction. Indeed, both appear to have been influenced, to some degree, by him: Eliot credited Trollope’s example as having enabled her to plan and execute Middlemarch on the “extensive…scale” with which she did (Eliot qtd. in Tracy, Later Novels 68), while Tolstoy claimed that “Trollope kills me, kills me with his virtuosity,” while he was revising his own expansive realist masterpiece, War and Peace (1869) (qtd. in Hall, Trollope 401).

103 Poovey notes that Trollope himself didn’t begin to think of his Barsetshire novels as a series until he was composing Framley Parsonage for Cornhill Magazine in 1860 (31). And indeed, it is in this story that he first makes mention of “the country chronicles of Barsetshire,” to which he repeatedly refers readers for the histories of many of his characters and their relations (FP 451). However, Doctor Thorne’s title character is, we are told, related to Mr Thorne of Ullathorne, a wealthy squire whom we met in Barchester Towers, and the Grantlys and the Proudies both make appearances in this chronicle, suggesting that Trollope was already linking his works together with more than simply “their shared setting” (Poovey 32).

105 indisputably intended as a sequel and thus must be read as a deliberate effort to not only build on the success of its predecessor, but also build up—enhance, solidify, reify—its novel world and middling worldview. In doing so, Barchester Towers not only confirmed to “every one…that

English literature had a novelist the more,” as James would write (“Trollope” 98), firmly establishing Trollope as an English author of distinctly English fiction (and effectively confirming his position within England), but began to assert the independent, solid and substantial, impressive and impressing reality of that fiction.

Barchester Towers adds to the details accumulated in The Warden in a number of significant ways, the most obvious being the decision to revisit The Warden’s fictional-yet- familiar cathedral town. In so deliberately returning to the same locale (and announcing as much in its title), Barchester Towers plays into its readers’ desire for “emotions of recognition” and invites them back to a place they already know—although this time the site of recognition is not merely contemporary England but Barchester, which now seems as real as any other place the reader has heard of but never been. However, even as it attaches itself to its modest forerunner,

Barchester Towers quickly reveals a more ambitious authorial scope, one hinted at in the heights of the cathedral spires for which it is named: thus, where the titular emphasis on the central site in Trollope’s literary landscape implies a shift in narrative focus from an individual (albeit representative) “history of an old man’s conscience,” to borrow James’s description of The

Warden (99), to the social history of an entire community,104 the narrative itself broadens the social and geographic dimensions of the newly-christened county of Barsetshire by adding a number of new characters and locales to the landscape. In doing so, Barchester Towers

104 Significantly, Trollope rejected Longman’s suggestion for a different title that would place a particular character at the centre of the story (Longman wanted the novel to be titled after one of the Proudies) and insisted on staying with Barchester Towers (Hall, Trollope 147). This titular emphasis on place would become the norm for the majority of the Barsetshire novels—Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset—the only exception being Doctor Thorne.

106 establishes a precedent that every subsequent Barsetshire novel would follow, effectively reinforcing the sense of Barsetshire as not only a dynamic, living world, but an ever-expanding, increasingly inclusive one as well. Indeed, by the end of the series, Barsetshire would include not only the cathedral town and its clerical inhabitants, but a number of large country estates owned by members of the landed-gentry (ranking from dukes and marquesses to baronets and squires), some poorer parishes inhabited by bricklayers, rural workers, and impoverished curates

(although only the last of these would be brought forward to actively participate in any of the narratives), a second, smaller city with its own railway station (Silverbridge), as well as an assortment of professionals scattered throughout (lawyers, doctors, politicians, and businessmen); so expansive would Barsetshire become, in fact, that while at work on Framley

Parsonage Trollope felt the need to draw up a map of his “dear county” for personal reference

(see figure 2.1).105

Such additions to Barsetshire meant Trollope’s readers were continually encountering new characters and settings there; however, by situating these encounters within close proximity to people and places already known, Trollope ensures his readers always return to a world in which they are “by no means strangers,” a world they always feel they already know and thus a world in which they are comfortable and safe—at home even (Athenaeum, “Barchester Towers”

105 In typical Trollopian fashion, he makes reference to his need to do so in the novel itself: “I almost fear that it will become necessary, before this history be completed, to provide a map of Barsetshire for the due explanation of all these localities” (FP 184). The map, which An Autobiography dates to the writing of Framley Parsonage (“as I wrote I made a map of the dear county” [A 154]), would not be published until 1927, when Michael Sadleir included it in his critical study, Trollope: A Commentary. According to Sadleir, however, Trollope’s map did not quite match up with the locations and distances given in the Chronicles of Barsetshire, prompting the critic to draw up his own map of Barsetshire with the aim of bringing it more in line with the details of the books (see figure 2.2). Interestingly, Sadleir’s map removes most of the rail routes, canals, and roads that connect the various settings within Barsetshire to one another as well as those that lead out of Barsetshire, connecting it to the rest of England. (On the edges of his map, Trollope has marked which roads lead to London, Guestwick and Exter; he has also marked the railroads as belonging to the Great Western Railway, which was (is) the railway company that connects London to the midlands, southwest England, and west England; the only such connection to the outside world on Sadleir’s map is the unnamed “Railway to London” he includes in the top right of his map). Sadleir’s decision effectively severs Barsetshire from the rest of England as well as effaces the modern networks that exist within Barsetshire, undermining the landscape’s claim to both reality and modernity and consigning it to a place within the nostalgic clouds of an imaginary, pre-industrial past. 107

45). The opening of Barchester Towers heightens the impression of return by deliberately assuming readers are familiar with Barchester and its inhabitants: the narrator makes no attempt to locate the cathedral town as he had at the beginning of The Warden, nor does he reintroduce characters from this previous novel, compelling readers instead to “begin with them as real,” as a reviewer for the Examiner wrote shortly after reading Trollope’s new novel (“Barchester

Towers” 41).106 This reality is then enhanced by the narrator’s brief description of the intervening years between the events of The Warden and the present, a description that suggests Barchester and its inhabitants have continued to exist—to live—despite the lack of authorial attention given to them during that time.107 No longer are we asked to “presume” that Barchester exists, we are expected to know that it does.108 Only new characters and places are introduced and described, a number of which would, over the course of the series, become as familiar and real to Trollope and his readers as their predecessors were now becoming. Notably, as the reviewer’s comment from the Examiner suggests, it appears that this process of being carried from novel to novel is what enables the characters, places, and the world they together make up to “begin as real,” to

106 Later novels, particularly Framley Parsonage, do sometimes reintroduce the characters from previous novels, but after giving the barest of histories, they tend to direct readers back to the previous chronicles for further details. For instance, in Framley Parsonage Miss Dunstable asks Mary Gresham, née Throne about the circumstances of her marriage to Frank Gresham, which took place in Doctor Thorne, and, rather than detailing these circumstances, the narrator tells us that “the tears came into her [Mary’s] eyes as she thought of the circumstances of her early love;— all of which have been narrated in the county chronicles of Barsetshire, and may now be read by men and women interested therein” (451).

107 Admittedly not all that much has happened in the interceding years—enough to give the impression of an extant world, but not enough to render that world unfamiliar to readers of The Warden. John Bold has died, leaving his wife Eleanor (née Harding) with “nearly a thousand a year” and an infant son (BT 1:17); Mr Harding continued to be the subject of much public discussion, although it is his “disinterested sacrifice” rather than his “cupidity” that is given attention (1:11); the issue of what to do about Hiram’s Hospital continued to be debated by newspapers, church officials, pamphleteers, and members of government, and a bill is eventually passed that vaguely decides the terms of the will, although it leaves the details to be worked out once again by the bishop, dean, and warden of Barchester (1:12-3). Barchester Towers picks up just after this bill is passed, opening with the death of Bishop Grantly, Archdeacon Grantly’s father, and the appointment of a new bishop to Barchester.

108 As the first novel set in a locale outside of Barchester (but in Barsetshire), Doctor Thorne does begin with a general description of the county somewhat akin to the one given in The Warden; however, in it Trollope notes that this county is “very dear to those who know it well” (DT 1), a phrase that nods to those readers who are familiar with the general setting, while inviting new readers to become familiar with it.

108 become real, for the reader. After all, not only does this process extend the world’s existence beyond the seemingly conclusive bounds of a single novel’s covers, effectively “denying the closed nature of any narrative” (Levine, Realist Imagination 187) and enabling Trollope’s world to become a familiar, constant presence entwined with its readers’ ongoing lives,109 but it also produces the impression of the world’s well-rounded, thoroughly-developed, hence real nature by revealing its people and places in different situations at different points in time, thus allowing readers to “realize them more and more completely,” as was noted in a review of The Last

Chronicle (Examiner, “Last Chronicle” 297).110

To point: in The Warden Dr Grantly is, the narrator tells us, “represented…as being worse than he is” because “we have had to do with his foibles, and not with his virtues” (W 266) and we are left with an impression of him as, to quote one contemporary reviewer, a “pompous, worldly high churchman…who bullies his father…and tyrannizes over his father-in-law”

(Athenaeum, “Warden” 34). While Barchester Towers continues to reveal how “worldly” the archdeacon is (a trait that is not necessarily a shortcoming for Trollope), it also reveals many of

109 In this constant proximity to its readers’ everyday reality, the series acts much like serial fiction which, as Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund argued in their seminal study, The Victorian Serial, became “entwined with readers’ own sense of lived experience and passing time” due to its “extended duration” (8)—which is perhaps why Trollope’s fiction ended up being so well suited to serial publication, as will be discussed below. Of course, such a comparison is not perfect since the Barsetshire novels did not appear continuously month to month or week to week as a single serial novel would; yet where a serial novel would, at its longest, run for nineteen months, Trollope’s Barsetshire series continued to appear over the course of twelve years—the first three as volumes, the last three as serials—arguably intensifying this “entwinement” to an unparalleled degree.

110 On Trollope’s sense of Barsetshire’s reality, see his farewell from The Last Chronicle, cited above in footnote 74. That his readers had come to feel the same way is suggested in numerous reviews of the series’ finale: see, for instance, the unsigned review of The Last Chronicle from the London Review which asserts, “To us…Barset has long been a real country…”, one in which many of the inhabitants “have been from time to time so vividly brought before us that we have thoroughly accepted the reality of their existence, their shadowy forms have seemed to take equal substance with those of our living neighbours…” (“Last Chronicle” 299); or the review from the Athenaeum, which holds that “if the reader does not believe in Barsetshire and all who live therein…the fault is not with Mr Trollope, but in himself” (“Last Chronicle” 301). That said, the reviewers weren’t always thrilled to reencounter Trollope’s characters: while the Barsetshire novels were originally appearing, Trollope was often criticized for including characters from previous novels, the complaint being that it was an unimaginative—even lazy—practice, thus a sign of him as a second-rate author. However, the more the characters appeared, the more they were welcomed by the public, until it was their absence that became what was regretted.

109 his more endearing virtues, including the “[strong] caliber” of his mind and the “honest genuine love” he has for his “wife and children and friends” (BT 2:5). And, as we encounter Dr Grantly in the subsequent Barchester novels, we continue to see different aspects of his personality, some more flattering than others. Collectively these images produce the effect of a complex, rounded, real individual who we have come to know much as we would a real person: over time.

Enhancing this reality is the fact that we also see Grantly change as the years pass and the world around him changes; as Trollope explains in An Autobiography, “In conducting these characters from one story to another, I realized the necessity, not only of consistency,—which, had it been maintained by a hard exactitude, would have been untrue to nature,—but also of those changes which time always produces” (183), for, “as here in our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creations of his [the novelist’s] change, and every change should be noted by him”

(233).111 While Dr Grantly perhaps does not change quite as dramatically as some of Trollope’s other characters (particularly those in the Palliser series), there is a certain amount of moral and personal growth that takes place over the course of the series as he checks some of his early, rather youthful, certainty, pomp, and ambition and learns to be contented with all that he already has. So intimate do we become with Grantly, so rounded, so familiar, so real, does he become to us during the hours and years we spend with him, that by the close of The Last Chronicle it is clear that he has become as much “our old friend” as he is Trollope’s (TLCB 556, emphasis added).

111 While the characters Trollope carries between novels exist in this “state of progressive change” (A 319), single- novel characters such as Mr Slope or the Stanhope family, who appear as actors only in Barchester Towers, never amount to more than static caricatures of whom the dynamic, “real” characters—Dr Grantly, Mrs Proudie, Miss Dunstable, etc.—are happy to recount stories in subsequent chronicles, a practice that implicitly reinforces their own claims to reality.

110

Significantly, it is not only the inhabitants and settings of Barsetshire that gain in substance and reality over the course of these novels, becoming familiar presences within the lives and realities of their readers, but the narrator as well. And, it is the narrator who most entirely erodes the distinction (that glass wall) between fiction and reality by deliberately exposing and repeatedly crossing the boundary between them. Unabashedly chatty, Trollope’s narrator readily assumes an intimacy with both the world he narrates and the readers he narrates it for, candidly negotiating—and eliminating—the space between them. His intimacy with

Barsetshire is achieved chiefly in two ways: first, the narrator’s omniscience gives him unfettered access to the characters’ lives and thoughts, past, present, and future and thus grants him a close, intimate knowledge of them;112 second, the narrator’s claim to a physical presence within Barsetshire gives him direct access to the characters and locales themselves and thus asserts his personal familiarity with them.113 While seemingly antithetical (how can an embodied actor also be an omniscient observer?), these two perspectives are easily contained within the glass case of the novel: the one narrates and the other inhabits Barsetshire’s textual world. Yet, in cordially sharing his “insider” knowledge of this world with the reader, Trollope’s narrator

(much like any other realist narrator) opens Barsetshire up to the reader, offering them a way into his literary landscape. This door does not, however, only open one way and, as if to prove as much, Trollope’s narrator routinely steps out of Barsetshire and asserts an equal intimacy with

112 This omniscience gives narrator access to the most private moments of his characters’ lives, allowing him to know them on a level that arguably supersedes intimacy for it goes beyond what they even know of themselves. For example, as Bishop Grantly lies dying in the opening pages of Barchester Towers, the narrator looks into the Bishop’s son’s mind where he sees Archdeacon Grantly struggling (but failing) “to keep his mind away from the subject [of succession]” (1.4), from what will happen after his father’s death knowing that, for him, it is “now or never” if he is to be appointed to his father’s position but also knowing that to be so appointed, his father must die; when he finally asks himself “whether he really longed for his father’s death” we see him trying to balance his ambition with his filial love, the latter of which proves the stronger (1.5).

113 Trollope asserts this personal familiarity when, for instance, he tells of his visit to Plumstead rectory, which he found “somewhat dull” (W 104), or of his inability to “endure…shak[ing] hands with Mr. Slope,” whom he finds somewhat repugnant (BT 1:29), both descriptions (selected from many such examples) imply his physical presence within the landscape and suggest that he is as much a character or actor in the novels as those he describes.

111

(and presence within) the world of his reader. He claims this intimacy not merely by directly addressing his readers and treating them as his friends and confidants, a practice which was, after all, common enough in the nineteenth-century novel, but by habitually “coming forward” in these congenial moments “as [the] author” rather than merely the narrator (National Review, “Mr

Trollope’s Novels” 83, emphasis added) and addressing the reader in what appears to be “his”— that is Anthony Trollope’s—“own person” (Leader, “Warden” 37). To offer one brief example of this tendency: writing of Eleanor Bold’s unexpected widowhood at the beginning of Barchester

Towers Trollope’s narrator apostrophizes to the reader, “Poor Eleanor! I cannot say that with me

John Bold was ever a favourite. I never thought him worthy of the wife he had won. But in her estimation he was most worthy” (BT 1:14). Having thus shared his personal opinion of Bold with the reader in a manner that asserts his intimacy with the Bolds (of whom he was close enough to have formed a personal opinion) and the reader (with whom he candidly shares this personal opinion), he goes on to explain his decision not “to define the character” of the Bolds’ infant son, a description he holds is “not worth our [that is, his and the readers’] while” since, “[o]ur present business at Barchester will not occupy us above a year or two at the furthest”; instead, he declares, “I will leave it to some other pen to produce, if necessary, the biography of John Bold the Younger” (1:15). Stepping out of the world of the novel (where “our present business” is located) into the world in which such novels are produced (where John Bold the Younger’s life story may be written by “some other pen”), the “I” of this final sentence effectively conflates the position of the narrator with that of the author—with, that is, the “I” of Anthony Trollope.

Dubbed Trollope’s “intrusive ‘I’” by the Leader (“Warden” 37), this tendency to interrupt the narrative in order to speak in “his own person”—offering personal opinions, asides, and anecdotes about himself, his subject matter, his novel-writing practices, as well as about current affairs and the state of England in general—was a practice consistently remarked upon and 112 scorned by critics for its disruption of “the ‘illusion of the scene’” (37). Such disruptions were perceived as a wanton and egregious violation of the rules of both genuine art and good taste as they had come to be defined (or rather, were coming to be defined) in the Victorian period

(“Trollope” 101).114 And yet, as James himself acknowledged, it was precisely this “honest, familiar, deliberate way of treating his readers as if he were one of them”—of candidly sharing his personal impressions, highlighting his own failings, and revealing the mechanics of his fiction—that “endeared him to many” (91). Perhaps the most famous authorial intrusion in all of

Trollope’s fiction occurs when, halfway through the first volume of Barchester Towers, the narrator announces that Eleanor Bold will not marry either of her present suitors. He reveals this fact because, as he explains just before doing so, “Our doctrine is that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified” (1.144). Here we see how these informal intrusions and candid admissions cultivates a familiarity and intimacy that encourages readers to feel comfortable with the narrator—to feel, that is, that they really know him and can trust (in) him. At the same time, by using his own person to narrate his fictional chronicles, Trollope encourages readers not only to trust in him, his novel world, and his middling worldview, but to conflate Anthony Trollope the author (who exists within the real world of nineteenth-century Britain) with “Anthony Trollope” the narrator (who exists within the fictional world of Barchester)—to see them as one and the

114 Although not the first, James was certainly the most vocal in his criticism of this particular Trollopian trait, claiming that such digressions were, in a manner, “suicidal” to achieving artistic greatness (101). That James uses his opposition to Trollope’s particular brand of realism to delineate his own theory of realism, the novel, and art in general has been pointed out by many recent critics; for a particularly insightful discussion of this critical maneuvering, see chapter two in Anna Maria Jones’s Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. For a discussion about why these narratorial intrusions were felt to violate the rules of art in the Victorian period, see Poovey’s “Trollope’s Barsetshire Series.”

113 same. That they did (indeed, that we do) so is clear from the willingness of reviewers and readers to attribute to Trollope the characteristics of his narrator, a tendency Trollope by no means discouraged—would, in fact, embrace: the “I” in his Autobiography sounds little different than the “I” in his novels after all. Such conflation suggestively blends the “real” with the “realist,” implicitly erasing the boundary that divides the two and encouraging readers to invest themselves

(at least) as thoroughly in the one as they do the other. Thus, as much as his narratorial intrusions appalled his critics, by treating his readers as equals and intimates and rendering them privy to the fictionality of his art, Trollope, rather counterintuitively, made his art appear more honest and real than if he had maintained the “illusion of the scene.”

That Trollope’s contemporaries did invest themselves in his fiction is clear not merely from their enthusiastic responses to subsequent chronicles (as well as much of Trollope’s non-

Barsetshire fiction of the 1860s and 1870s), but from the tremendous impression these works

(and their author) would come to make on them and their reality—affecting and influencing them as if they were life itself. Trollope’s influence was significantly intensified and extended by the switch from volume to serial publication that began with Framley Parsonage’s appearance as the lead novel in the first issue of what was to become one of the most successful magazine ventures of the nineteenth-century: George Smith’s new shilling monthly, The Cornhill Magazine—a fortuitous pairing to which we now turn.

IV. National Investments: Framley Parsonage and the Cornhill Magazine

“I wish Mr Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage for ever. I don’t see any reason why it should ever come to an end, and every one I know is always dreading the last number. I hope he will make the jilting of Griselda a long while a-doing” (Gaskell Letters 602).

Elizabeth Gaskell’s enthusiastic praise of her contemporary’s novel was penned shortly after its 114 fourth installment appeared in the Cornhill and reveals just how quickly the magazine’s readers had become invested in Trollope’s fourth chronicle of Barsetshire.115 In fact, as Andrew

Maunder points out in ““Discourses of Distinction”: The Reception of the Cornhill Magazine,

1859-60,” early reviews of the Cornhill suggest that the initial success of the magazine—a success held by contemporaries to be “quite without parallel in the records of magazine sales”

(Leeds Intelligencer qtd. in Maunder, “Distinction” 241)—was widely due to the immense popularity of its lead serial, a work which Trollope describes as being a “thoroughly English”

“hodge-podge” about “an English clergyman…led into temptation by his own youth and by the unclerical accidents of the life of those around him” and the “love of his [the clergyman’s] sister for [a] young lord”—the latter, “an adjunct necessary because,” Trollope explains, “there must be love in a novel” (A 142-3).116 By setting the story in Barsetshire, Trollope was able to “fall back upon…old friends” from the previous chronicles, including the Proudies and the Grantlys

(who remain at “war” with one another [BT 1.41]), Doctor Thorne and Miss Dunstable (who discover their love for one another), as well as a handful of others (Mr Harding and Frank and

Mary Gresham, for instance) who make brief appearances throughout. Together these characters fill this “slight” story with familiar faces, narrative depth, and social breadth, which in turn adds to the solid and substantial impression—the reality—of Trollope’s fiction (A 142).

Although a “hodge-podge,” the novel’s combination of elements proved wildly popular

“from first to last,” as Trollope proudly recalls in An Autobiography (142); and over the sixteen months that Framley Parsonage ran in the Cornhill approximately “a hundred thousand

115 Framley Parsonage was published in monthly installments from December 1859 to April 1861 (although the first issue of the Cornhill was dated January 1860) and was printed in volume form in April 1861.

116 In addition to being Trollope’s first serial publication, Framley Parsonage was also his first multi-plot novel, a form he would continue to use with great success for the rest of his novel-writing career. Here, his remark about the necessary inclusion of romance points to his awareness of his audience’s tastes and expectations—and his continued willingness to write into them.

115 readers…followed with breathless eagerness the loves of Lucy Roberts and Lord Lufton, and gossiped and cried over Mark and Mrs Mark, as though they had been living personal friends”

(Athenaeum qtd. in Maunder, “Distinction” 252).117 Where in The Warden Trollope had discovered his “proper line” of writing, in Framley Parsonage and the Cornhill he found his

“proper” mode of publishing and gained access to his “proper” audience;118 and, as new installments of Framley Parsonage appeared month after month in the pages of the Cornhill, it became a familiar, engaging, even expected part of the English reading public’s real lives—so much so, in fact, that it seemed to blend into their lives as readers “gossiped and cried” over its characters “as though they had been living personal friends,” as if, that is, they were real.119

Indeed, like Gaskell’s devoted “every one,” who were actively “dreading the last number,” the

“hundred thousand readers” mentioned by The Athenaeum were personally and emotionally invested in Trollope’s newest novel, and it was precisely this investment that secured their financial investment in both the magazine and the novelist as they continued to pay their monthly shilling in order to keep up with their “friends” and see just how long the jilting of Griselda

(among other things) would take.

Yet in purchasing the Cornhill, readers were investing in more than their own emotions for, as the comments by both Gaskell and the Athenaeum suggest, Framley Parsonage was also

117 In terms of sales The Athenaeum’s estimation wasn’t too far off: Maunder notes that the “sales of the first Cornhill stood at 110,000, although this settled down to around 87,500 at the end of 1860” (“Distinction” 241). Of course, these figures don’t give us the number of actual readers since family members and neighbours frequently shared newspapers and magazines, a tendency to which the Cornhill, with its insistence on family-friendly content, was sure to appeal and, in 1863, the National Review would claim that the “Cornhill count[ed] its readers by [the] millions,” suggesting just how popular the magazine had become (“Voice” 167).

118 Notably, writing for serial publication also influenced his writing style as he “began using the serial part to organize the production of his novels” (Turner, Magazines 9): all of his future novels, whether they were published serially or not, were planned and written in parts.

119 The idea that Trollope’s characters are so familiar and so life-like that they are like “living personal friends” becomes a critical commonplace in Victorian reviews of his fiction (see footnote 111). On serial fiction’s entwinement with reality more generally, see footnote 110.

116 understood as a social investment, one that gave its readers a sort of cultural capital that signaled their belonging to and participation in a particular social class. As the Saturday Review points out in a review published shortly after the novel’s final installment appeared, “At the beginning of every month the new number of his book has ranked almost as one of the delicacies of the season; and no London belle dared to pretend to consider herself literary, who did not know the very latest intelligence about the state of Lucy Roberts’ heart, and of Griselda Grantley’s [sic] flounces” (“Framley” 121). Purchasing the latest issue of the Cornhill to read the latest installment of Framley Parsonage was, in other words, like purchasing an admission ticket into fashionable English society where news of Barsetshire and its inhabitants (their romances, politics, and fashions) was exchanged and traded across dinner tables and in drawing rooms, publically feasted on “as one of the delicacies of the season.” Being informed as to the current going-ons in Barsetshire was, therefore, a sign of one’s social distinction, one’s social literacy; accordingly, an investment in Framley Parsonage was, to a certain degree, an investment in one’s social identity, in, that is, one’s status and position.

The number of people who made such investments (emotional, financial, social) in

Framley Parsonage would not only transform Trollope into one of the most popular and well- paid serial novelists of the 1860s—an author whose readers could be “counted by hundreds of thousands, instead of by hundreds” (Trollope qtd. in Hall, Trollope 209)—but, as Maunder argues, would also help to establish the Cornhill as the preeminent literary magazine of the period, enabling it to “outstrip other mid-Victorian competitors” (“Distinction” 242) and

“assume almost mythic status as a cultural signifier” (239). In Hall’s estimation, “[n]either

[Trollope nor the Cornhill] alone would have enjoyed such spectacular success,” and the influence of the one on the other, and the impact of their “confluence” (to borrow Hall’s term for their relationship) on the English reading public was immense (Trollope 197), particularly since, 117 as Trollope points out in An Autobiography, during “the first few years of the magazine’s existence, [he] wrote more for it than any other one person” (140).120 In Trollope, the Cornhill seemed to have found the ideal proponent of and voice for the values it sought to express, while in the Cornhill, Trollope appeared to have found the ideal platform for his. This symbiotic relationship was not lost on contemporaries: as the Illustrated London News would point out shortly after the appearance of Trollope’s third novel in the Cornhill, so thoroughly did

Trollope’s fiction seem to “harmonise…with the general character of the magazine that…[it] might have sprung up spontaneously within the yellow cover” (qtd. in Maunder “Monitoring”

45). Around the same time, the National Review would note that “[t]he Cornhill counts its readers by the million, and it is to his [Trollope’s] contributions, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that the reader first betakes himself” (“Voice” 167), an appeal explained by the fact that

Trollope writes with an eye to his audience, keeping to territory that is familiar (read: comfortable, recognizable, safe) to readers of the Cornhill: “He travels with great agility…but never in a region where the million readers of The Cornhill find the least difficulty in following him” (173). Thus paired, the synergy between Trollope and the Cornhill would, as Maunder argues, create a “dominant discourse” or “cultural outlook” that would both shape and define the identity, values, and position of his/its primary readers: the Victorian middle class (“Monitoring”

41).

That Smith, with the Cornhill, “set out quite deliberately to appeal to the socially mobile groups formed by the Industrial Revolution—to people who were now looking for a defining

120 Following the success of Framley Parsonage, the Cornhill would publish three more novels by Trollope, including the fifth chronicle of Barsetshire, The Small House at Allington, which ran from September 1862 until April 1864. Smith would also publish The Last Chronicle of Barset, but rather than including it in the Cornhill, which was, at the time, printing another of Trollope’s novels, he issued it as a stand-alone serial in thirty-two weekly parts between 1 December 1866 and 6 July 1867. Trollope’s publishing relationship with the Cornhill and Smith would end after The Last Chronicle when Trollope agreed to become the editor of a new monthly magazine, St. Paul’s.

118 lifestyle and respectability of their own”—as Maunder puts it (46), is evident in both the form the magazine took and the content it carried. Attractively bound and printed on good-quality paper,121 the substantial 128-page magazine was priced at one shilling122 and was pitched as a general-interest magazine focused on “contemporary English life, society and manners” (Smith qtd. in Maunder, “Monitoring” 47). Named after Cornhill Street in the City of London, the financial centre of England’s metropolis and the street on which Smith’s well-established publishing firm, Smith, Elder, and Co., was located, the title spoke to an audience of urban professionals. Balancing this business-oriented title, however, is the magazine’s cover, designed by Godfrey Skyes (see figure 2.3). Both lavish and pastoral, the magazine’s title, centered and inscribed in elegant block-lettering, is surrounded by an ornate Renaissance frame with four roundels of rustic figures (a ploughman, a sower, a reaper, and a thresher) that are representative of rural England and the bounty of the land; linking this bounty to the magazine itself are two overflowing baskets of fruit and flowers that appear directly above the word “Cornhill.” The elaborate design is suggestive: not only does it simultaneously hint at the refined and wholesome nature of the magazine’s abundant contents, but it implicitly links the “contemporary English life” discussed within its pages (and presumably lived by its readers) to the more traditional, more stable world of rural England before industrialism. In many ways it is a cover (and product) designed, as Marie E. Warmbold suggests, for “the cosmopolitan gentleman, who may have had to earn his money in the city but enjoyed thinking of himself as a country gentleman” (138-9)—

121 “Smith was,” Maunder writes, “at the forefront in recognizing the nature of the book as a commodity…[and] the Cornhill was, in the first instance, a physical thing” to be desired, purchased, and displayed (“Distinction” 244).

122 This price “would presumably have put the magazine beyond the reach of the poorer classes” (Maunder, “Monitoring” 48), but would have seemed a reasonable price to middle-class readers used to paying a guinea (21 shillings) annually for a subscription to Mudie’s.

119 the type of man, that is, who had some money but not landed property, a respectable profession but not, perhaps, a traditional, established position.123

The contents of the magazine lived up to the cover’s promise of abundance, wholesomeness, and substantiveness: at six times the length (and six times the price) of Charles

Dickens’s new weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round, which was launched at the beginning of 1859, the Cornhill was filled with material solicited from “well-educated gentlemen and women” (Thackeray qtd. in Turner, Magazines 11)—including some of the most celebrated

English thinkers and writers of the day.124 Non-fiction contributions, which made up slightly more than half of the magazine’s content, covered a wide array of subjects, including travel, science, history, biography, society, and the arts. A glance at some of the early issues reveals lengthy essays, often published in parts across multiple issues, on topics such as the lives and works of William Hogarth and Leigh Hunt, the difficulties facing the National Gallery, the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Hans Holbein the younger, student life in Scotland, the history of English lighthouses, Sir John Franklin’s lost arctic expedition, the evolution of animal life, and the effects of chloroform. All of these essays, even the most technical and scientific, are written in accessible, conversational language that is at once informative and intimate making them easy to understand and enjoyable to read. A generous selection of poetry and fiction made up the rest of the magazine’s contents. The magazine’s tone and variety, Maunder notes, were

123 That this cover did appeal to this audience and contributed to magazine sales is suggested in the “business- oriented” Morning Herald’s claim that, “The very cover is enough to tempt one to buy what is concealed by so fair an outside” (qtd. in Maunder, “Distinction” 244).

124 The phrase “well-educated gentlemen and women” comes from the editor’s open letter to future readers and potential contributors, which was published as an advertisement for the Cornhill in November 1859, and was by no means an exaggeration. In the first few years of the Cornhill’s publication those counted among these “well- educated” contributors included, for example, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, George Henry Lewes, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins. Moreover, although the contributions published in the Cornhill were unsigned, “their authorship was generally known” (Hall, Trollope 207) as Gaskell’s early wish for “Mr Trollope” to “go on writing Framley Parsonage for ever” reveals.

120 intended to appeal to “a new kind of audience, a collective of people not simply genteel in the traditional sense but those genteel in the new sense, engineers, merchants, manufacturers,” and their wives, and the “extraordinary reception” of the Cornhill was in turn due to its ability “to meet the needs of these readers…to be entertained and also to understand…the world that was developing around them” (“Distinction” 247).

Notably absent from the magazine was, however, content focused on more controversial, divisive topics: foreign affairs and political economy, for instance, as well as content that revealed religious or political partisanship. It also avoided more ephemeral content such as contemporary book reviews and most current events—which were, of course, equally likely to stir up controversy and debate. Thus, although the magazine declared an interest in including “as much reality as possible,” the reality it actually included was, as Mark Turner explains, “limited and specific”: “a construct within the periodical’s pages, defined and regulated by a type of censorship” that excluded “controversy…and cater[ed] to particular and unmistakable class- and gender-specific assumptions” (10-1). The parameters of this “reality” are clearly set by the

Cornhill’s open letter to potential contributors and readers:

There are points on which agreement is impossible, and on these we need not touch. At

our social table, we shall suppose the ladies and children always present; we shall not set

up rival politicians by the ears; we shall listen to every guest who has an apt word to say;

and, I hope, induce clergymen of various denominations to say grace in their turn.

(Thackeray qtd. in Turner, Magazines 11)

Civilized and civilizing,125 the Cornhill was, as Turner so aptly puts it, “destined for the drawing- room” where it would educate and entertain its middle-class readers in a polite, amusing,

125 Maunder highlights the Cornhill’s civilizing agenda—hinted at in its open letter’s emphasis on good manners and social harmony—in “Monitoring the Middle-Classes,” noting, “the Cornhill did seek to transmit a set of civilizing 121 intelligent fashion on matters of interest rather than business, culture rather than politics, thus encouraging them to feel both cultured and leisured, literate and genteel—rather like their more traditionally genteel upper-class counterparts (12).

The Cornhill’s commitment to this civilized, non-controversial content naturally extended to the type of fiction it favoured: comfortable realism focused on “conventional habits” and “everyday life” in rural and provincial England, of which Framley Parsonage is certainly a prime example (Weekly Dispatch qtd. in Maunder “Monitoring” 46). Other notable examples include Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1862-4)126 and The Claverings (1866-7),127 as well as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1864-6), both of which Warmbold argues were directly influenced by the success of Trollope and Framley

Parsonage in particular. Each issue also contained two full-page illustrations, also done in the realist mode, and numerous vignette drawings by some of the most admired illustrators of the period.128 Most notable among the early artists was John Everett Millais, the celebrated Pre-

Raphaelite painter, who would illustrate two of Trollope’s novels in the Cornhill, including

values and civilizing exhortations…and often the Cornhill devoted large parts of a particular issue to conveying generalized messages about the nature and value of civilized behaviour” (45).

126 Trollope’s fifth Chronicle of Barsetshire was notably brought in to replace George Eliot’s Romola (1862-3) as lead serial after the latter, an ambitious, heavily researched novel set in fifteenth-century Florence, failed to boost sales. In the Westminster Review’s assessment, “the general novel-reader is impatient with such [antiquarian] details” as those Eliot includes in her historical novel (qtd. in Warmbold 143); in Trollope’s, Eliot failed to take into account the fact that she was writing for “tens of thousands…not to single thousands” and, consequently, “fire[d] too much over the heads of [her] readers”—something he had warned her against after reading the first part (qtd. in Warmbold 143).

127 Although not part of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, The Claverings does seem to be set within the diocese of Barchester and the Proudies make a brief appearance early on—a fascinating extension of Trollope’s Barsetshire world that has been little investigated.

128 In their introduction to the Penguin edition of Framley Parsonage, David Skilton and Peter Miles note that “[g]reat care was to be lavished on the illustrations. John Everett Millais was employed to illustrate Trollope, and Thackeray illustrated his own work, while the then famous names of W. J. Linton and C. Swain, and the resources of the Dalziel brothers, the finest wood-engravers in London, ensured the very highest standard” (8). Other notable artists published in the Cornhill at this time included George du Maurier, Fredric Leighton, Helen Allingham, and George Houseman Thomas (who also illustrated The Last Chronicle of Barset).

122

Framley Parsonage (see figures 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6).129 With their intense concentration on the social and material details of English domestic, middle-class life (in particular their depictions of family relations, domestic interiors, and contemporary fashions), these illustrations offer a something of a visual summary of the “reality” put forward by both the Cornhill and Trollope’s fiction. In fact, by Trollope’s account, Millais’s meticulous realism enhanced—even reified—the

“reality” he depicted in his novels, bringing it more sharply into focus: “I have carried on some of those characters from book to book, and have had my own early ideas impressed indelibly on my memory by the excellence of his delineations” (A 150, emphasis added). The public seemed equally “impressed” by Millais’s illustrations: although Trollope was initially furious about

Millais’s second illustration for Framley Parsonage, “Was it not a lie?” (figure 2.4), which he held to be “simply ludicrous” due to the abundance of flounces on Lucy’s dress (which not only dominate the image, making it more about Lucy’s crinoline than Lucy herself, but, to his mind, seemed a “burlesque” at odds with his fiction’s realism), he “consent[ed] to forgive the flounced dress” and Millais after seeing “the very pattern of that dress some time after the picture came out” (Trollope qtd. in Hall, Trollope 204). So realistic were Millais’s illustrations, it seems, that

(at least in this case) they became “patterns” for reality: bringing into being the very fiction

129 The other of Trollope’s novels published in the Cornhill and illustrated by Millais was The Small House at Allington, creating even more of a continuity between the works in the series. Trollope’s enthusiasm for Millais’s illustrations is well recorded in An Autobiography, and the two would work together on three additional novels: Orley Farm (1862), Rachel Ray (1863), and Phineas Finn (1868). Trollope had also hoped Millais would illustrate The Last Chronicle of Barset and when Millais declined (having, for the most part given up illustration and not feeling up to the demands of weekly publication), George Houseman Thomas was hired but was given instructions to model his illustrations off of Millais’s. Houseman’s drawings, as Hall notes, “drew mixed appraisals from Trollope: Thomas’s Grace Crawley “has fat cheeks, & is not Grace Crawley”; Mr Crawley before the magistrates “is very good. So is the bishop. Mrs Proudie is not quite my Mrs Proudie” (Trollope 300). Such responses suggest how aligned Trollope felt Millais’s illustrations were with his fiction; the interplay between Millais’s illustrations and Trollope’s texts has been discussed in detail by N. John Hall in Trollope and His Illustrators and Trollope: A Biography and, more recently, by Ellen Moody in Trollope on the ’Net and in her accompanying website on Anthony Trollope and Simon Cooke and Paul Goldman in articles on The Victorian Web.

123

(reality?) they delineated, much as Trollope himself sought to do with his own real(ist) fictions.130

Smith’s ambitious and costly enterprise (indeed, he claimed to have spent £5000 on advertising alone in the months leading up to the magazine’s launch!) was helmed, or rather, hosted,131 for the first two and a half years, by the widely celebrated novelist, William

Makepeace Thackeray. In recruiting Thackeray to be the Cornhill’s editor (offering him the

“prodigious” sum of £8500 for a two year contract [Thackeray qtd. in Maunder, “Distinction”

245]), Smith looked to capitalize not merely on the fact of Thackeray’s fame but, more significantly, on the nature of it. At the time of the Cornhill’s inception Thackeray’s name,

Maunder reminds us, “was as familiar to consumers of popular culture “the public,” the middle- class subscribers to Mudie’s, as it was to the cultural elite, the “men of letters”” (245); as such, it imbued the Cornhill with both a popular appeal and a “kind of cultured grace”—an intellectual authority, respectability, and status—that was particularly compelling “for the socially ambitious” middle classes who wished to claim those very qualities for themselves (246). Indeed, as Trollope would later write, “Thackeray’s was a good name with which to conjure”—to, that is, make something out of nothing—and by advertising with it, Smith was, Trollope claims, “able to make an expectant world of readers believe that something was to be given them for a shilling very much in excess of anything they had ever received for that or double the money” (A 140, emphasis added). That “something” was, Maunder argues, a specific cultural identity: to that

“expectant world of readers,” investing in (purchasing, reading, reviewing) “Mr Thackeray’s

130 In fact, when Trollope later discusses how he hoped to influence his readers through his realistic, relatable characters in An Autobiography, he seems to allude to the experience of seeing Millias’s illustration come to life, writing, “I do think that a girl would more probably dress her own mind after Lucy Roberts than after Flora MacDonald” (146, emphasis added).

131 In his open letter to the public advertising the magazine (cited above), Thackeray imagines the Cornhill as a “social table” and his readers as “guests,” creating the impression of himself as the host of an elaborate dinner party.

124 new serial,” as the Cornhill became known, appeared to be a means of both cultivating and asserting one’s own good taste, respectability, refinement, and social class (Morning Herald qtd. in Maunder, “Distinction” 246).

As Maunder’s valuable analysis of the Cornhill’s launch and early reception makes clear,

Thackeray’s influence on both the Cornhill and its initial success with those “socially ambitious” middle-class readers was immense, as was the magazine’s design, advertising, and cultural focus; however, the novel Thackeray was preparing for the Cornhill’s launch was, in Mary Hamer’s words, “proving too slight to rank as the lead novel in an important new magazine” (69). Thus, although Thackeray provided the Cornhill with a reputation, another novelist was needed to give the magazine a (lead) voice, one who would live up to the “great expectations which were raised as to this periodical” and conjure something, someones, out of nothing (A 140). Enter Trollope.

While still a relatively new author (in the public eye, at least), Trollope’s popularity had been steadily increasing since The Warden: Doctor Thorne, his third chronicle of Barsetshire, had been even more of a critical and commercial success than Barchester Towers,132 and the two non-Barsetshire novels published on either side of Doctor Thorne—The Three Clerks (1858) and

The Bertrams (1859)—were widely admired for their “true to life” pictures of “the present day”

(Leader, “Three Clerks” 62) and their “clever, vigorous, boldly-drawn sketches of character”

(Athenaeum, “Bertrams” 92).133 With five well-received novels to his name, Trollope’s reputation as an intelligent, accurate, amusing, and prolific novelist of contemporary English life

132 Doctor Thorne would, in fact, go on to be reprinted more often than any other of Trollope’s novels during his lifetime making it, in Trollope’s words, “the most popular book that I have written,—if I may take the sale as a proof of comparative popularity” (A 125).

133 Notably, in reviews of all these works Trollope is typically referred to as the author of The Warden and Barchester Towers (both of which were typically recommended to readers not yet familiar with them), revealing that these novels had become the touchstones against which other novels were being measured and around which his reputation was solidifying.

125 was steadily solidifying;134 thus, when he wrote to Smith offering to sell his “wares” to this new literary venture in October of 1859, less than two months before the Cornhill’s intended launch, his offer appeared rather like a godsend to the publisher (A 173).135 As Trollope recounts in An

Autobiography, he was immediately asked by Smith to provide a three-volume novel to the magazine, the first installment of which was needed within six weeks; for this work he would be paid the impressive amount of £1000, which was “more than double what [he] had yet received”

(138) and enough to renovate the comfortable home near London that he had just acquired (147).

Knowing how important the lead serial would be to the success of his magazine, Smith specifically requested “an English tale, on English life, with a clerical flavour,” clearly hoping to draw on the particular success of Trollope’s Barsetshire novels even as he set the scope and tone of his periodical (142).136 It was “on these orders” that Trollope “went to work” writing Framley

Parsonage (142), the novel that would become the primary means of securing his position in

England as a propertied gentleman, a professional London man-of-letters, and “the voice of the

English middle class.” However, rather than focusing on the identity and position Framley

Parsonage (and the Chronicles of Barsetshire more generally) enabled Trollope to achieve, my

134 His reputation as a novelist was becoming so solid, in fact, that he had, shortly before his tenure with the Cornhill began, made arrangements with the Post Office to move with his family back to England because, as he puts it, “a man who could write books ought not to live in Ireland—ought to live within with reach of the publishers, the clubs, and the dinner parties of the metropolis” (A 132).

135 In fact, it appears that it was Thackeray’s attachment to the magazine that drew Trollope’s attention to it, the latter having been an ardent admirer of the prestigious author’s work; moreover, as Trollope admits in An Autobiography, his desire to become “acquainted with literary life in London” was also a motive in his writing to Smith (136): having already accepted a job with the Post Office that would move him and his family back to London, his offer to Smith was a means of gaining entry to London’s literary circles when he arrived there—which it did. For Trollope’s account of how his association with the Cornhill gave him the personal, professional, and social acceptance that he had longed for in his youth, see chapter 8 of An Autobiography.

136 Notably, Smith’s request for “an English tale, on English life, with a clerical flavour,” came after his rejection of Trollope’s initial offer of Castle Richmond, “an Irish story” he was currently at work on; as Trollope notes in An Autobiography, Smith “was sure that an Irish story would not do for a commencement” (142), a sentiment that reaffirms Trollope’s earlier realization that England wanted, first and foremost, to read about England.

126 concluding section will consider the identity and position it establishes for its readers—the real(ist) return on their readerly investment.

V. Real(ist) Returns: Cultivating Character in Framley Parsonage

That Framley Parsonage is at once addressed to and concerned with the upwardly-mobile middle classes that the Cornhill set out to attract is clear from the outset of the novel. Opening with the chapter title, “Omnes omnia bona dicere,” a Latin phrase taken from Terence’s Andria

(166 BCE), a comedy in which a father comments on his son’s good reputation only to later be disappointed by him, Trollope immediately addresses himself to a classically-educated audience—an audience like his university-educated protagonist, Mark Roberts. However, by then glossing the quotation in the opening paragraph—“When young Mark Roberts was leaving college, his father might well declare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition” (FP 33, emphasis added)—Trollope widens his intended audience to include those without a classical education, but who possess an interest in obtaining one: the implicit promise that his gloss of the chapter title makes, after all, is that his novel will teach readers the meaning of the allusion—that it will, in a manner of speaking, give them that education. And, indeed, by the end of the first installment all readers have been alerted to the fact that Mark may not live up to all the good things said to his father about him, enabling them to occupy as well-informed a position with regard to the story that will follow as that of the classically-educated reader. In this way,

Trollope presents his novel as one that will educate its upwardly-mobile readers in the cultural 127 discourse of England’s elite, but will do so on its own terms in relation to members of their own class.137

Of the Roberts family we are told that Mark’s father “was a physician living at

Exeter[,]…a gentleman possessed of no private means, but enjoying a lucrative practice, which had enabled him to maintain and educate a family with all the advantages money can give in this country” (33). Mark himself, having benefited from those advantages, especially the advantage of a gentleman’s education, is even more securely established than his father: shortly after graduating from Oxford he was gifted the position of Vicar of Framley (with its “comfortable” parsonage and income of £900 a year [43]) on the basis of his school connections and his good reputation (writes Trollope: “He lived with the best set—he incurred no debts—he was fond of society, but able to avoid low society—liked his glass of wine, but was never known to be drunk; and, above all things, was one of the most popular men in the university” [34]). Of Framley

Parsonage where Mark lives with his wife, Fanny (“one of the pleasantest companions that could be brought near to a man as the…partner of his home, and owner of his heart” [36]), we are told:

[N]othing in the parsonage way could be more perfect than his parsonage. It had all the

details requisite for the house of a moderate gentleman with moderate means, and none of

those expensive superfluities which immoderate gentlemen demand, or which themselves

demand—immoderate means. And then the gardens and paddocks were exactly suited to

it; and everything was in good order;—not exactly new, so as to be raw and uncovered,

and redolent of workmen; but just at that era of their existence in which newness gives

way to comfortable homeliness. (44)

While the emphasis of this expository material is on the upward trajectory of the Roberts family

(the fact that, within a single generation, they have gone from no private means, to a profession

137 Later in the novel Trollope will specify precisely the social and economic class he is addressing (and to which he belongs) when he writes of “us…with our eight-hundred a year—there or thereabouts” (217). 128 and money, to a position with property for life), the good fortune of Dr Roberts’ son (which is, notably, the result of his father’s hard work and his own good character), and the comfort and stability of the moderate, middling position in which Mark finds himself (exemplified in the parsonage itself), the story proper is about the social roles, responsibilities, and standards of behaviour appropriate to this ascendant class, which Trollope proceeds to examine, test, and define from a variety of angles through his novel’s multiple plotlines. Indeed, if the Cornhill tells

“the story of the rise of a professional class…who established themselves as a powerful elite by taking control of the very terms upon which persons would be recognized and authenticated,” as

Maunder convincingly argues (“Monitoring” 55), then Trollope’s is the leading voice in identifying and (re)defining those terms.

Framley Parsonage’s two central plots revolve around two of the Roberts siblings, Mark and Lucy, and the temptations they face: one examines Mark’s professional ambitions, while the other focuses on Lucy’s romantic entanglements.138 Mark is tempted by status and the promise of further advancement, implicitly proffered by Nathaniel Sowerby, Esq., whose indulgent

“bachelor mal-practices” have led to an immense debt and loss of credibility, which, in turn, are leading to the loss of his ancient family estate, Chaldicotes, and the social and political position attached to it (47); Lucy is tempted by love and the offer of marriage, tendered by Lord Ludvic

Lufton, whose mother, Lady Lufton, is responsible for Mark’s position at Framley and is committed to the idea that her son marry someone “significant” (someone, that is, with both

138 “What can I do?” and “Whom will I marry?” are, George Levine suggests, the two central questions Victorian realist fiction addresses itself to, although Levine claims they place greater emphasis on the former (“Reconsidered” 23). Such an emphasis fits with regard to Trollope’s novel as Mark’s professional ambitions (and errors) constitute the primary plotline; that said, Lucy’s romance with Lord Lufton was arguably the more popular of the two. Arguably, much of Trollope’s success, in Framley Parsonage and later novels, lay in his capacity to successfully weave together plotlines addressed to each question, frequently revealing them to be bound to one another.

129 position and presence).139 Yet where Mark gives into temptation, twice putting his name as guarantor on bills totaling £900 for Sowerby, despite knowing him to be “a dangerous man” who ruins others (56); Lucy does not, twice refusing Lufton’s proposal of marriage because it is unauthorized by his mother. Broadly speaking, Mark’s error, which comes to threaten his reputation, his home, and his happiness, ultimately teaches him (and us) the value of what he already has; in fact, the entire novel can be read as a paean to moderate living and middle-class life such as is celebrated in the opening chapter.140 Certainly, Mark’s mistake—or rather, the material and psychological distress it causes him—makes it clear that social advancement, when it comes at the cost of virtue and honesty, is not worth the price. Lucy’s principled conduct, which eventually earns her the respect and approval of Lady Lufton (as well as the position of

Lord Lufton’s wife), reinforces this lesson, clearly demonstrating that personal virtue and principled behaviour (as well as a certain amount of wit, energy, and honest feeling) are of more value and “significance” than property, position, and presence alone. Shortly after Lufton proposes to Lucy for the first time (and she refuses him), Trollope makes this point explicit:

That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a

title or an estate, for an income of a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer

treats his sheep and oxen—makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which

are comprised a mind and soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread

in the lowest stage of degradation. But a title, and an estate, and an income, are matters

139 In chapter 43, pointedly entitled “Is she not insignificant?,” Lady Lufton tells her son exactly why she is against a marriage between him and Lucy: “She is—insignificant. I believe her to be a very good girl, but she is not qualified to fill the high position to which you would exalt her” (506). Lucy’s insignificance lies not only in the fact that she is the vicar’s sister but also in what Lady Lufton sees as her lack of presence (largely a result of her petite stature and unconventional beauty).

140 Perhaps the most overt celebration of middle-class life comes from the wealthy commercial heiress, Miss Dunstable, who, upon first meeting Mark, declares, “I think it ought to be the happiest life that a man can lead, that of a parish clergyman, with a wife and family, and a sufficient income” (60). The sincerity of her opinion is suggested by her subsequent decision to marry the staunchly middle-class Dr Thorne rather than one of her numerous upper-class suitors.

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which will weigh in the balance with all Eve’s daughters—as they do with all Adam’s

sons. Pride of place, and the power of living well in front of the world’s eye, are dear to

us all;— are, doubtless, intended to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us

remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly. (261)

What emerges out of both these plots, then, is a value system rooted in moral principles and standards of behaviour rather than money, property, or position: a value system that claims for the middle classes an identity independent of their financial and familial inheritances, one that is rooted in something deeper, something dearer: their “own inner sel[ves].”

At the same time, however, this is a value system that when adhered to is shown to be capable of securing or achieving money, property, and position—all of which, the novel (like all

Trollope’s novels) firmly maintains, are worth obtaining (“are doubtless, intended to be dear”) as they together provide comfort and security, influence and power. Understanding and following this value system both externally and internally—cultivating one’s social self and one’s inner self—thus becomes of the upmost importance for those wishing to secure these things. And, it is precisely such understanding, such guidance, such cultivation that Trollope’s novels (along with the Cornhill magazine) offer their readers: on one level, as Maria Warmbold notes, Trollope’s novels act as “social guides,” showing readers “how to avoid problems through right behaviour and [by] following suitable models” (144) (recall Trollope’s desire to “impregnat[e] the mind of the novel-reader” with a sense of such “right behaviour” through the thoughts and actions of his relatable-because-real characters); on another, they act as moral guides, teaching readers proper values and feelings by making “virtue alluring and vice ugly” in their narratives (A 222). For

Trollope, it is thus “a matter of deep conscience how he shall handle those characters by whose words and doings he hopes to interest his readers,” for, as he explains in An Autobiography,

“men’s conduct will be actuated much by that which is from day to day depicted to them as 131 leading to glorious or inglorious results” (221). Here, then, we return to the fetish of realism: as

Anna Maria Jones points out in Problem Novels, “Trollope understands his fiction,” and the fiction of others, “as doing real things in the real world—as exercising a kind of discursive power over readers, for good or ill” (88, emphasis added). Trollope elaborates on this power in an 1879 essay entitled “Novel Reading”141:

With such evidence before us of the wide-spread and enduring popularity of popular

novels, it would become us to make up our minds whether this coveted amusement is of

its nature prone to do good or evil. There cannot be a doubt that the characters of those

around us are formed very much on the lessons which are thus taught. Our girls become

wives, and our wives mothers, and then old women, very much under these inspirations.

Our boys grow into manhood, either nobly or ignobly partly as they may teach, and in

accordance with such teaching will continue to bear their burdens gallantly or to

repudiate them with cowardly sloth. (278, emphasis added)

Novels, he continues, have “in great measure taken the place of sermons” (280); and, in their popularity and prevalence (particularly with young men and women), are now “the former of our morals, the code by which we rule ourselves, the mirror in which we dress ourselves, [and] the index expurgatorius of things held to be allowable in the ordinary affairs of life” whether readers are conscious of them as such or not (279). Trollope is here positing what Jones suggests “we might call, a bit ironically, a pre-Foucauldian Foucauldian theory of productive power” (59) as he imagines popular novels—his novels—disciplining subjects and, in doing so, forming “the characters of those around us.”

141 Parts of this essay, which was published in The Nineteenth Century as a defence of the morality and usefulness of novels, first appeared nine years earlier in Trollope’s lecture, “On English Prose Fiction as Rational Amusement,” given in Hull, Glasgow, and Edinburgh in January 1870; when preparing An Autobiography he would return to the lecture and essay, revising and reproducing sections of both in chapter 12, “On Novels and the Art of Writing Them.” 132

It is, in part, to this end that the moral, meritocratic value system Mark and Lucy’s plotlines establish and the standards of behaviour and the social and moral values that are endorsed within them (in particular: honesty, responsibility, moderation, industriousness, integrity, generosity, and hospitality) are further explored, tested, debated, defined, and reinforced within the numerous secondary plotlines that unfurl alongside theirs. Most prominent among these plotlines are Sowerby’s unscrupulous and, ultimately, unsuccessful efforts to maintain his property and position in the face of his material and moral bankruptcy; Miss

Dunstable’s practical attempts to balance the ironic, worldly identity she assumes while in

London or among “the Chaldicotes set” and the sincere, affectionate one she assumes while in

Barsetshire or among “the Framley set”;142 Harold Smith’s perpetually undermined efforts to advance his political career through an admixture of hard work and tuft-hunting; Griselda

Grantly’s triumphant, yet hollow marriage-plot; and the Crawley family’s ongoing struggles with poverty and pride. As we contemplate and compare these interrelated (but not always intersecting) plotlines—the characters therein, the conflicts they face, the choices they make, and the consequences that result—what emerges is, somewhat paradoxically, both an overarching sense of what constitutes right behaviour and proper values (openness and honesty, for example) and an underlying impression that, in practice, these categories require continual negotiation, that, to some degree, right behaviour and proper values are contingent, shifting in relation to an individual’s circumstances and position as well as the particular situation at hand.

142 “The Framley Set and the Chaldicotes Set” is the title of chapter two, in which Trollope sets up an opposition between the politics and values of these two Barsetshire sets. That Miss Dunstable’s behaviour changes based on who she is with as well as where she is, is significant in undermining the traditional county versus city contrast (one that is often ascribed to Trollope’s Barsetshire novels): indeed, in Trollope’s fiction, it is more the characters who inhabit a space than the space itself that influences others; the city itself is not inherently corrupt, nor is the country innately pure. Thus, while Mark’s decision to accept an invitation to Chaldicotes at the beginning of Framley Parsonage is bemoaned by his wife and Lady Lufton, it is on the grounds of who will be there, not the place itself. In other words, in Trollope’s fiction place is a product of character rather than the other way around.

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For example, while the novel openly endorses Miss Dunstable’s repeated maxim of magna est veritas—great is the truth—by repeatedly showing how deception leads to disgrace and unhappiness (as in the cases of both Sowerby and Mark), the nature of truth and the situations calling for it are much debated in Lucy’s story, complicating this apparently straightforward principle. To explain: not only does Lucy lie to Lufton about her feelings for him in order to be true to herself (believing, as she does, that Lufton doesn’t really love her and that she would be scorned by his mother and thought scheming by society if she were to accept his proposal, neither of which she feels she can bear), but she repeatedly deceives Reverend Crawley in order to help him and his family, first sneaking in food and gifts to help relieve their poverty, then coordinating a “kidnapping” to protect his children from their mother’s fever (FP 422). In both situations she ruminates over the legitimacy of her falsehoods: wondering with regard to her lie to Lufton, “is a falsehood always wrong, or can it be possible that the end should justify the means?” (323), and determining with regard to her deception of Crawley that “there are men made of such stuff that an angel could hardly live with them without some deceit” (271). While

Lucy doesn’t feel particularly good about all of her lies (in fact, with regard to her lie to Lufton,

Trollope goes to great lengths to delineate her emotional distress, which is as complex and layered as the flounced dress Millais draws her in, in the pointed titled illustration, “Was it not a lie?” [see figure 2.4]), all are undertaken with some greater, more honest “end” in mind. What

Lucy’s plot thus suggests is a need for flexibility in the assessment of right behaviour and proper values—after all, it is her falsehoods to Lufton and Crawley that eventually earn her the respect and love of both Lady Lufton and Reverend Crawley.

Writing of the “multiple centers of interest” or value systems embodied by different characters in Barchester Towers (which, while not exactly a multi-plot novel in the manner of

Framley Parsonage, does follow a community rather than an individual), Elizabeth Langland 134 suggests they “reflect [a world] in the process of definition” (372, emphasis added). “We do not,” she explains, “perceive a single underlying social order or set of principles which gives a sense of unity to diverse characters, situations, and relationships. Rather we recognize alternate ordering principles,” which Langland describes as a “conflict of possibilities” (372). While

Langland is interested in the fact that this “conflict of possibilities,” these “alternate ordering principles” or value systems, redirect the reader’s attention away from any single value system or character towards society as a whole (which Langland persuasively argues is the actual protagonist of Trollope’s fiction), my own interest lies (not incompatibly) in how Trollope deploys such alternatives as a means of involving the reader in “the process of definition”—the ideological world-building, the shaping of values, and the forming of character—that is taking place within his novels, within their nation, and within themselves.

By presenting the reader with not only a variety of situations or moral dilemmas, but also a variety of conflicting viewpoints on those situations and dilemmas and thus “on the negotiation between moral principles and individual moral choices” in general (Skilton, “Trollope” 219),

Trollope encourages the reader to adjudicate between them—to discuss, to debate, and, in doing so, to think critically about the behaviour and values presented and their own values. Indeed,

Trollope is less interested in “embrac[ing] or “confirm[ing]” readers in the generally accepted, conventional world view” as critics such as Raymond Williams and D. A. Miller have argued, than he is in encouraging his readers to think more critically, more actively about the “generally accepted, conventional world view” and the values that seemingly govern both it and them

(Maunder, “Monitoring” 45). Audrey Jaffe has recently articulated a similar point in The

Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real, claiming that Trollope actively promotes “the idea that characters and readers are best off judging for themselves: an activity in which an adherence to conventional constraints and proprieties (those of the law or of conventional morality) gives way 135 to more complex, individuated reasoning” (92, emphasis added). Like Lucy, who realizes she

“must regulate her own conscience” (and behaviour) in matters of honesty, propriety, and feeling

(FP 323), “the reader thus taught,” Jaffe argues, “will not merely obey prohibitions or require overt constraints in order to behave properly, but will instead arrive—or attempt to arrive—at his or her own conclusions” about proper behaviour and values (93), thereby cultivating an inner self that is at once self-disciplining and self-determining—in short, autonomous.

Arguably, then, reading Trollope’s fiction teaches the reader not what to think but to think, question, and debate; in doing so, it encourages readers to cultivate—indeed, create— themselves. To read Trollope’s novels—to invest time, thought, emotion, and money in them— is, therefore, to invest not only in their reality, but in one’s own. In the Chronicles of Barsetshire,

Trollope establishes a solid and substantial platform from which he articulates the much more radical, even destabilizing idea that one’s position is determined, not by the traditional structures of inheritance and property, but by one’s self—a self cultivated in and realized through the fictions that one reads.

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Chapter Figures

Figure 2.1: “Barsetshire”

Sketch-map by Anthony Trollope, ca.1859. First printed in Michael Sadleir’s Trollope: A Commentary (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1927).

137

Figure 2.2: “Trollope’s Barsetshire”

Sketch-map by Michael Sadleir in Trollope: A Commentary (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1927).

138

Figure 2.3: “The Cornhill Magazine: No. 1”

Cover design and illustration by Godfrey Skyes. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co. December 1859; issue dated January 1860).

139

Figure 2.4: “Was it not a lie?”

Illustration by John Everett Millais for Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. (Cornhill Magazine, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., June 1860.)

140

Figure 2.5: “The Crawley Family”

Illustration by John Everett Millais for Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. (Cornhill Magazine, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., August 1860.)

141

Figure 2.6: “Mark,” she said, “the men are here.”

Illustration by John Everett Millais for Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. (Cornhill Magazine, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., March 1861.)

142

Chapter Three

Unsettling England: Daniel Deronda and the Deracination of National Life

“Do you like uncertainty?” “I think I do, rather,” said Gwendolen, suddenly beaming on him with a playful smile. “There is more in it.”

~ George Eliot, from Daniel Deronda (1876)

By risking the immediate disappointment of a large number of her most ardent admirers, George Eliot has paid us a higher compliment than if she had given us another Silas Marner. She has practically refused to believe the common libel, upon us who read fiction, that we only care to look at our own photographs and to be told what we already know.

~ R. E. Francillon, from Gentleman’s Magazine (October 1876)

I. On Land and At Sea: Reading from Adam Bede to Daniel Deronda

When the first monthly installment of Daniel Deronda appeared in February of 1876,

George Eliot was considered England’s greatest living writer, a reputation she had established with her solid and substantial stories of “old county-life” (Stephen 475) including Scenes of

Clerical Life (1857), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861), and secured with her epic study of provincial life, Middlemarch (1872). Read as “guide[s] to living rightly” (Crosby, Ends 13), Eliot’s novels were seen by her contemporaries as a “national blessing,” and were treated “more like Bibles than books of mere amusement” (qtd. in Crosby,

Ends 13).143 As their author Eliot herself had come “to occupy the revered position of a moral

143 In a review of Middlemarch, the Examiner relates an anecdote that celebrates adopting a hermeneutic approach to reading Eliot’s fiction: 143 guide within a period of changing religious and social views” and was looked to for comfort and counsel by the English reading public from whom she received regular petitions for advice on both public and private matters (McDonagh, George Eliot 2). She was, as Jill Matus writes, “a

Victorian sage” (“George Eliot” 226). Unsurprisingly, anticipation and expectations for her newest novel were quite high for author and readers alike: Eliot feeling an “urgent sense of cultural, even national, duty” because of her prominent position (Henry, Life 238), her readers eagerly awaiting another comforting, enlightening “story of English life” (Lewes, Eliot Letters 6:

193) from their “great imaginative teacher” (Dowden 440).

Yet, with its abrupt opening among the roulette tables in the fictional German spa of

Leubronn,144 Daniel Deronda immediately appeared to “differ in a very marked way from any form of novel to which George Eliot has hitherto accustomed us,” as a reviewer from the London

Globe and Traveller noted shortly after the second installment was published, adding, it

“appear[s] to be of a much broader and more markedly dramatic order” than any of her previous novels (qtd. in Martin, Serial 219). While the breadth and drama anticipated were certainly not

We heard the other day of a husband and wife who find in each two-monthly installment as much as they can read in the two months, two or three pages affording the text for a whole evening’s thought and discussion, and we can both understand and admire their state of mind. There is hardly a page of ‘Middlemarch’ in which there is not enough condensed wisdom to furnish an hour’s profitable reflection, and they who have time thus thoroughly to master the teacher’s lessons are much to be envied. (qtd. in Martin, Serial 245-46) So much wisdom was believed to be contained in Eliot’s works, in fact, that in 1872 one of her most ardent admirers, Alexander Main, published a collection of excerpts from her works under the title Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot, a volume which was updated and republished each time a new book by Eliot appeared.

The phrase “national blessing” comes from a letter from Blackwood, while “more like Bibles” comes from a review by W. H. Mallock.

144 In her critical biography of George Eliot, Nancy Henry notes that Leubronn “is a composite of the numerous spas Eliot and Lewes visited in search of health and relaxation” throughout their lives, and locates the “germ” of Daniel Deronda’s opening scene in Homburgh where, during an 1872 visit (during which the Finale of Middlemarch was written), Eliot and Lewes saw Byron’s grandniece, Miss Leigh, “gambling and losing at the roulette table” (208), a scene that forcibly struck Eliot: “The saddest thing to be witnessed is the play of Miss Leigh…who is only 26 years old, and is completely in the grasp of this mean, money-raking demon,” she wrote to John Blackwood, “It made me cry to see her young face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her” (qtd. in Henry 208).

144 that of what is typically referred to as “the Jewish plot” of the novel145—a plot which culminates in Deronda’s discovery of and subsequent commitment to his Jewish ancestry in the form of proto-Zionist ambitions that prompt him to leave England—it seemed clear from the outset that

Daniel Deronda was venturing into foreign territory for England’s celebrated chronicler of provincial life as she left behind the rural and provincial Midlands of the past and turned to the grand country manors, urban sprawl, and cosmopolitan spaces of the present.146 And, initially,

Eliot’s readers were eager to follow her into this novel territory: not only were the serial sales higher for Daniel Deronda than they had been for Middlemarch, but each installment attracted numerous critical notices by reviewers eager to speculate on the direction of George Eliot’s

“dramatic” new novel. For the majority of English readers, however, this enthusiasm would steadily wane, transforming into disappointment, frustration, and confusion as the novel, easily

Eliot’s most ambitious, complex, far-reaching, and experimental work to-date,147 unfolded in increasingly unexpected—and, for many, entirely unwelcomed—directions.

Although many of Eliot’s contemporaries were willing to acknowledge the effort, intelligence, feeling, and insight that had gone into the novel after its final installment appeared in September 1876, in the end most also felt that Daniel Deronda was, in the words of Henry

145 While convention refers to the two parts of Daniel Deronda as “Gwendolen’s story” and “the Jewish plot,” I will be referring to them as “the English plot” and “the Jewish plot” both for the sake of parallelism and, more importantly, to emphasize my conviction that both are equally invested in the national implications of their plotline. 146 Eliot’s fiction had, of course, left the English Midlands before, most notably in Romola (1863), her novel of fifteenth-century Florence, and, while this novel was widely-admired by her contemporaries, it was not loved; there was a notable sigh of relief when she returned to, as one reviewer put it, “her own region of provincial English life” (Venables 278). As another reviewer explained, “though it was extremely absurd to persist in disliking Romola because she was not a Warwickshire dairymaid, and still more absurd to persist that the authoress had no business to shift her scenes or change her characters, we may still rejoice that she has again come back to those studies of English life, so humourous, so picturesque, and so philosophical, which at once raised her into the very first rank among English novelists” (Morley 251, emphasis added). Such comments emphasize the public’s sense that Eliot was, first and foremost, a national novelist whose proper focus was England and English life.

147 Nancy Henry notes that “in Daniel Deronda, [Eliot] took everything further than she ever had before: the novel represents her most experimental novelistic structure, her most complex sentences, her most esoteric subjects, [and] her most unusual metaphors” (232). Moreover, such elaborate formal devices are deployed to represent what is her widest range in character class and type, her most layered sense of temporal existence, her deepest psychological studies, her most expansive moral and political vision, and her most self-conscious and daring narrative to-date. 145

James, “a brilliant failure” (“A Conversation” 424). To explain this “failure” critics identified a number of seemingly problematic formal features including: the predominance of “moral purpose” and abstract “reflection” over natural observation and “spontaneous creation,” which, while a common enough criticism of Eliot’s fiction from Romola forward, reaches unprecedented heights in the reviews of Daniel Deronda (Dicey 404); the difficulty and density of the prose itself, which was felt to be both “labored” and “laborious”148 (Hutton, “Deronda” 368); the apparent incongruity of the novel’s “two plots,” which undoubtedly appeared all the more disjointed in the wake of the intricate web of connections that is Middlemarch;149 and, the most commented upon “problem” of all, the Jewish focus of one of these plotlines (the titular plotline no less), which was met by the majority of English reviewers with a mixture of “bewilderment and affront”150 (Saturday Review, “Deronda” 377).

148 Indeed, many of Eliot’s contemporaries found Daniel Deronda’s prose to be particularly challenging and numerous reviewers remarked on the difficulty of the syntax and the obscurity of the language (see, for instance, Saintsbury’s review for the Academy, Dicey’s review for the Nation, and James’ review for the Atlantic Monthly, all of which are reprinted in Carroll’s Critical Heritage); even Eliot’s good friend, Anthony Trollope, confessed to having trouble reading Daniel Deronda due to its syntactic complexity and density noting in An Autobiography that “there are sentences which I have found myself compelled to read three times before I have been able to take home to myself all that the writer has intended” (247).

149 Since its serialization there has been much discussion of Daniel Deronda’s uneven, bifurcated structure—of its two tenuously linked, increasingly discrete plotlines—and there have been many critical attempts to resolve the relationship between these plots. For the Victorians (indeed, for many twentieth-century readers) the commonest, most expedient solution was to imagine the novel as two novels and simply focus on the one they preferred. For most, this was the English plot, and the Jewish plot was often ignored by reviewers, skimmed over by readers, and, in some extreme cases, excised entirely. The most infamous example of this is, of course, F. R. Leavis’s post-WWII attempt to “cut away” the “bad part” of the novel from the “good part” and publish the remains under the title Gwendolen Harleth; this proposal was, however, rejected by publishers (qtd. in Eliot Letters 6: 290). It is significant to note, however that the temptation to ignore portions of the novel was not exclusive to non-Jewish readers; as Regina Lewis notes: “Like their Gentile counterparts who concentrated only on the Christian half of the novel, reviews and debates in the European Jewish press focus mainly on the Jewish characters and Zionist narrative” (203) and Hebrew translations frequently cut out the English plot (Himmelfarb 139). Such intolerant responses to Daniel Deronda are discussed at greater length in section 4, below.

150 In “Contemporary Critics and Judaism in Daniel Deronda,” Carol Martin notes that the selection of reviews reprinted in David Carroll’s Critical Heritage “give only a hint of the negative reaction to the “Jewish portion” of the novel” (91); her article, however, makes it clear just how widespread such reactions were among English reviewers, and she offers the following summary of their general objections to the Jewish portion of the novel: “it is highly objectionable that a young man brought up as an English Christian gentleman should turn around and adopt the Judaism of his parents; Deronda is too idealistic, a “prig” (especially when he does not take the Christian heroine for his wife, but chooses the young Jewess instead); Mordecai is too idealistic, and therefore unbelievable; Judaism is not a religion and the Jews are not a people from whom one expects idealistic values or behavior; readers just are 146

Compounding the disappointment and frustration that these particular “blemishes” gave rise to was, as many reviewers noted, the book’s failure to live up to the expectations of what a

George Eliot novel should be (Hutton, “Deronda” 365). As a rather diplomatic reviewer for the

London Globe and Traveller explained shortly after the novel’s final installment appeared,

the reasons [for the readers’ disappointment in Daniel Deronda] are not hard to find. It

deals with people and with things of a very different order, in every respect, from those

we expect to meet with in George Eliot’s novels, and it is hard to distinguish all at once

between genuine disappointment and the very natural feeling that arises from looking

eagerly for one thing and finding another, though the two may be of equal value. We are

taken away from our familiar homesteads. (qtd. in Martin Serial 259, emphasis added)

That the “very different” “people and…things” this critic is obliquely referring to are the novel’s

Jewish characters and concerns is something he confirms elsewhere in the review when he notes that “the present, past, and future of the Hebrew race…does not readily combine…with our chronic interest in our neighbors and especially in ourselves”—a statement that creates a clear divide between categories of “us” and “them,” the “familiar” and the “different,” and the English reader and the “Hebrew race” (qtd. in Martin “Contemporary” 104). While the reviewer is sympathetic to this “different order,” suggesting it “may be of equal value” to “our” more familiar one, he is also sympathetic towards the “very natural feeling[s]” its unexpected presence provoked in Eliot’s readers. Indeed, what is most provocative in this critic’s explanation of the

English public’s disappointment with Daniel Deronda is his general sense that, in not finding what they were looking for in a novel by George Eliot, in finding instead something they were decidedly not looking for, something “different,” these readers were not merely disappointed but not interested in Jews and the whole Jewish plot is therefore tedious and boring” (93). That said, not all critics were upset by the Jewish parts of Daniel Deronda, and the novel received a number of eloquent defenses from both Jewish and English critics—although the majority of the latter noted that it would be some time before the novel was appreciated by Eliot’s readers.

147 dislocated—actively “taken away from” the “familiar homestead” of their readerly horizons of expectation and experience.151 Other reviewers articulated similar experiences of disorientation and dislocation, including a particularly bewildered critic from the Saturday Review who, in an effort to explain why Daniel Deronda felt like “a falling off from Adam Bede, and Middlemarch, and a whole train of favourites,” declares, “the fact is that the reader never—or so rarely as not to affect his general posture of mind—feels at home. The author is ever driving at something foreign to his [the reader’s] habits of thought” (376-7, emphasis added). The critic goes on to complain that Eliot herself “seems to go out with them [“the leading persons—those with whom her sympathies lie”] into a world completely foreign to us” (377, emphasis added). Here, the

“foreign” elements of the novel not only prevent English readers from being “at home” in Daniel

Deronda but they deprive them of Eliot’s sympathy and guidance as she seems to abandon them for a strange and unknown world. The reviewer, somewhat inadvertently, sums up his frustration and bewilderment—his sense of abandonment, dislocation, uncertainty, and betrayal—with his later statement: “We are at sea throughout” (377).

Implicit in both reviewers’ comments is a sense that a novel by George Eliot is supposed to deal with “familiar” (English) rather than “foreign” (Jewish, non-English) people and places, and deal with them in such a manner than it enables the reader to “feel at home”—to feel comfortable, secure, and certain of themselves and their world. And, the fact is, such expectations are very much in keeping with “the sort of effect” Eliot originally claimed she

151 In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Hans Robert Jauss argues that a reader’s “horizon of expectation” is shaped not only by the social norms and historical situation of a given time and place but by his “horizon of experience,” or that which he has previously read. Works that achieve acclaim when they are first published, Jauss claims, tend to cater to both horizons, reproducing rather than challenging ideological and narratological structures. The text itself “predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception…awaken[ing] memories of that which was already read…and with its beginning arouses expectations for the “middle and end”” (23). That Eliot was conscious that Daniel Deronda would ultimately jar against her readers’ horizons of expectation and experience is suggested by her certainty that “the Jewish element” was “likely to satisfy nobody” (Eliot Letters 6: 238). For a thoughtful discussion of Eliot’s efforts to discipline and control her readers’ expectations, particularly in Adam Bede, see Debra Gettelman’s “Reading Ahead in George Eliot.”

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“desire[d] to produce” in her readers (Eliot Letters 3: 24). More specifically, as she explained in an early letter to her publisher, John Blackwood, her initial aim as a novelist was to produce just

“the sort of effect she [Jane Carlyle] declares herself to have felt from ‘Adam Bede’”: one of

“gentle thoughts and happy remembrances” (24), of the familiar and comforting. Or, as Carlyle so memorably described it,

It was as good as going into the country for one’s health, the reading of that Book was!—

Like a visit to Scotland minus the fatigues of the long journey, and the grief of seeing

friends grown old, and Places that knew me knowing me no more! I could fancy in

reading it, to be seeing and hearing once again a crystal-clear, musical, Scotch stream,

such as I long to lie down beside and—cry at(!) for gladness and sadness; after long

stifling sojourn in the South; where there [is] no water but what is stagnant or muddy!

(17-8)

Carlyle’s effusive comments suggest that Adam Bede prompted intense feelings of comfort, security, and familiarity; feelings that were so strong, in fact, that they had the power to imaginatively relocate her to a place more familiar and beloved—less foreign—than her present place in London, which the native Scot famously found both “stifling” and “stagnant.” By no means alone in her feelings regarding the restorative, comforting influence of Adam Bede (or the oppressions of modern metropolitan life), Carlyle’s sentiments were widely echoed by many of her contemporaries. For instance, a reviewer from the Daily News declared that Adam Bede had the power to “take us away from the conflict and excitement of our own ‘high-pressure’ age, with its extreme theories and extreme reactions,” by transporting its readers back “into a society which, if no less earnest and trying to those who composed it, has been rounded by time into an aspect of comparative simplicity and peace” (qtd. in Martin, Serial 105). A critic for Bentley’s

Quarterly Review similarly maintained that Adam Bede’s readers had “welcome[d] it as the voice 149 of their own experience,” “chim[ing],” as it did, “with associations and thoughts which have been lying half developed and struggling for expression in many minds” of the “peaceful pleasures,” “gentle excitements,” and “simple natural scenes” of England’s rural past (Mozley

87-9). Even Queen Victoria found that the novel “chimed” with her own experience, claiming it reminded her of the “rural rhythms and old-fashioned values” of her beloved summer home in the Scottish Highlands, a place to which she would retreat for peace and comfort throughout her reign (K. Hughes 205).152 Such responses suggest that for many of its readers Adam Bede helped to alleviate the uncertainties and dislocations of modern life by encouraging those “gentle thoughts and happy remembrances” that returned readers to the “familiar homesteads” of the rural, provincial past (whether actual or imagined) and gave them a sense of calm, comfort, and certainty that comes with being in a world that they feel they understand and belong to.

As the reception of Daniel Deronda makes clear, however, it is precisely such calm, comfort, and certainty, such familiar at-homeness that Eliot refuses her readers in her last novel.153 That is, seventeen years after Adam Bede’s comforting appearance, Eliot appears to have deliberately exacerbated the uncertainties and dislocations of modern life by taking her

English readers away from their “familiar homesteads” and leaving them “at sea” in what seemed to them to be a strange and foreign world/narrative. But why? I submit that Eliot does

152 So deep an impression did Adam Bede make on the Queen that she not only recommended the novel to her family and friends across Europe, but, in 1860, commissioned watercolours of two scenes from the novel (one of Hetty in the dairy and one of Dinah preaching on the Green), both of which still hang in Buckingham Palace (K. Hughes 205).

153 Of course, Eliot published one final work of fiction, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), shortly before her death in 1880; however, because of its radically experimental style and form and its apparent “lack [of] plot, development, drama, light and shade, movement and feeling” (Ashton qtd. in Buzard, “Impressions” 205), this self- conscious collection of essays narrated by a fictional (albeit, semi-autobiographical) persona has never been considered either a novel or a major work in Eliot’s oeuvre—hence my decision to refer to Daniel Deronda as her “last major novel.” That said, Impressions has been receiving increasing critical attention of late, with many acknowledging its significance to Eliot’s intellectual and aesthetic development and aims. Perhaps the most provocative recent reevaluation has come from James Buzard in his essay “Impressions of Theophrastus Such: “Not a Story”” in which he argues that Impressions is “not just “not a story,” but a refusal to traffic in storytelling” (205). This refusal to cater to her readers’ desire for story and narrative coherence is a provocative development after Eliot’s deliberate disappointing of her readers’ expectations in Daniel Deronda that I am focused on.

150 this in order to dislodge, to deracinate, her readers—her nation—from the comfort and certainty of their established subject position—a subject position that Eliot had come to feel the English realist novel (her own included) had, over the course of the nineteenth century, helped to render too comfortable and secure, too certain and complacent in and with itself. The result of such comfort and certainty was, Eliot recognized, a deeply-rooted national egotism that was dangerously limited and limiting for individuals and the nation as a whole. Accordingly, although Eliot’s reviewers focused primarily on the disruptive, disconcerting, discomfiting nature of the Jewish elements of Daniel Deronda (elements to which I will return), this shift from an aesthetic of settled comfort to one of dynamic discomfort permeates the whole of the novel, and it is telling that the other “blemishes” the reviewers complained of are formal rather than thematic. Indeed, Eliot’s commitment to this new aesthetic enters into the very structure and style of the novel itself as Eliot sets out to disrupt the realist conventions—or rather, the realist comforts—that her readers had come to expect from her and the realist novel more broadly.154

Of course, the desire to unsettle, even shock readers is not exclusive to Daniel Deronda; in fact, as Caroline Levine has recently argued in her essay, “Surprising Realism,” such a desire is at the heart of Eliot’s realist project: “From her first writing on realism in the 1850s to Daniel

Deronda,” Levine writes, Eliot “puts a remarkable emphasis on surprise”—on “revelations and realizations, narratorial interjections and startling plot twists” (63)—as a means of startling readers and characters into “reassessments of themselves and their world” (71). More specifically, Levine explains, “[r]ealist surprises are moments of sudden knowledge that compel

154 The idea that Daniel Deronda aesthetically challenges or exceeds the realism of Eliot’s previous fiction is expressed as early as R.E. Francillon’s 1876 review of Daniel Deronda (printed in Gentleman’s Magazine) in which he argues that Daniel Deronda is “in conception and in form, a Romance” and therefore at odds with “the uncompromising realism of her former works” (383). Later critics have broadened the charge, claiming that Eliot’s last novel “ushers in the shift from the conventions of Victorian realism to the more radical narrative innovations that characterize the high modernist novel” (Hollander 75), or, even more radically, that it is the work in which “the history of English realism comes to an end” (Tucker 35). For other discussions of Daniel Deronda’s revisions of, or breaks with realism see, for instance, Sarah Gates, George Levine, Josephine McDonagh, and Alex Woloch.

151 two kinds of readjustment: changes in feelings towards others, on the one hand, and a newly proportionate grasp of the relation between the self and the world, on the other” (72). Although the majority of her essay focuses on the aims of Eliot’s realism (sympathy and knowledge) and on how Eliot’s characters are propelled into both by these “realist surprises,” Levine’s provocative reading offers us a way of understanding how Eliot’s art affects her readers, and my own understanding of Eliot’s fiction is indebted to hers. At the same time, however, where

Levine reads Daniel Deronda as “remarkably similar” (69) in its deployment of such “moments of surprise” as Eliot’s earlier works (72), I understand this last novel to be a work that goes so far beyond her previous novels in both the number and the magnitude of these surprises that it not only strains against, even pushes beyond, the mode of realism that characterizes her earlier works, but also suggests the limits of and the problems with their achievement.155 For instance, if we consider the responses to Adam Bede discussed above, then we see that in spite of any

“moments of surprise” encountered therein, Eliot’s readers, while perhaps momentarily shocked, frustrated, even disturbed by them, are by the novel’s end able to settle back into—are, I would argue, encouraged to settle back into—a comfortable, familiar relation with themselves and their world that, even if adjusted, remains rooted in a sense of their understanding and certainty about themselves and the world rather than any genuine understanding of or openness to the other.

Thus, Eliot’s readers are just as, if not more so, established—settled, confident, secure,

155 In “Daniel Deronda: Late Form, or After Middlemarch,” Alex Woloch argues that Daniel Deronda is “an exemplary instance of novelistic “late style,” because it is “at once extending, merely recapitulating, and straining against the novelist’s own previous works,” specifically, Woloch contends, Middlemarch (167). In particular, Woloch suggests, Daniel Deronda struggles with Middlemarch’s “expansive, harmonious, balanced,” ““integrated” fictional world,” which it “simultaneously seems to build on…and to work against…to subsume and dissolve” (168). The influence of Middlemarch on Daniel Deronda is undeniable, and the structural and thematic parallels between the works clearly suggest that the latter is, to a degree, reimagining (or at least revisiting) aspects of the former; however, if we read Middlemarch as the fullest expression of a realist vision Eliot had been exploring in her fiction and essays since the 1850s, then we can read Daniel Deronda’s struggle with it as a struggle with her realist vision more generally.

152 contented—in themselves, their world, and their relation to the world at the novel’s close as they were at the novel’s opening.156

Not so for Daniel Deronda. Here, moments of surprise—the discomforts, shocks, difficulties, disappointments, and uncertainties of the text—become so frequent and so intense that not only are we unable to truly settle into the text, to “feel at home” in or with it, but, by the novel’s end, we are left reeling, left in a state of discomfort and uncertainty that extends well beyond the pages of the text and enters into our lives. Yet, despite being bewildering, this state of uncomfortable uncertainty carries with it the possibility of genuine growth and change, for sympathy and knowledge, for, as Gwendolen so breezily—and accurately—declares before her engagement to Grandcourt, “there is more in it”—more, that is, in uncertainty than there is in certainty (DD 124). In this chapter, I read Daniel Deronda as an attempt to remould, revitalize, and reimagine England’s national life by exposing the dangers and limits of settled, certain being and the limits of the sympathy and knowledge that such settled being allows for, and by simultaneously pushing its readers into a more dynamic, more ethical way of being in and relating to the world that is predicated on uncertainty and the continual struggle to understand the ever-changing relation between self, other, and the world that such uncertainty necessitates.

II. Comfortably Grounded: Eliot’s Early Realism

The idea that Victorian realism comforted readers, acting as a defense against the chaos, incoherence, unknowability, and uncertainty of the rapidly changing—“deconstructing” (G.

Levine, Realistic Imagination 4)—world within which the Victorians self-consciously lived is a

156 Take, for instance, the case of Hetty Sorrel: while we may be surprised and disturbed by Hetty’s seduction, infanticide, exile, and death when we read of them (so much so, in fact, that we may undergo a sympathetic change in feeling towards her, towards real-life others we presume to be like her, or even towards ourselves for undergoing such a change in feeling), we are ultimately able—encouraged even—to feel at ease with these events as Hetty’s troubling and tragic narrative is contained within the more peaceful, more comfortable, more comforting, narrative of Adam Bede/Adam Bede, which closes with an image of domestic harmony and fecundity. 153 long-established one; as Josephine McDonagh notes, one of the predominant “ways of thinking about realism that recur[s] throughout the later nineteenth and twentieth century” is “the presupposition…that the aim of realism is to make people at home in the world” (“Space” 61).

Accordingly, even as realism self-consciously questions, resists, and disrupts inherited forms and moral values, as George Levine famously argues in The Realistic Imagination, the genre also, he reminds us, “almost invariably” strives to “rediscover moral order” (20) in order to “reconstruct a world out of a world deconstructing” (4). Much like the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony

Trollope discussed in my previous chapters, Eliot’s fiction self-consciously participated in a profound resettling and reshaping of its readers’ relation to and perception of the world in which they lived157—indeed, Eliot’s earliest definition of realism famously extols its capacity to

“remould our life” by teaching readers to see, understand, and sympathize with “definite, substantial reality” (the real lots of common men) rather than “vague forms bred by imagination on the mists of feeling” (the imaginary lots of ideal men) (“Ruskin” 368). That Eliot’s particular brand of realism was at the forefront of such consolatory efforts to “rediscover” order,

“reconstruct” the world, and “remould…life”—specifically English life—in the face of the physical and psychic dislocations of modernity is, naturally enough, what earned her the position of Victorian England’s moral and cultural guide.158 Certainly, as the above discussion of her

157 In fact, Eliot cites both of these authors as influences on her own work: she claims an early “affinity” with Gaskell’s works—noting, “I was conscious, while the question of my power was still undecided for me, that my feeling towards Life and Art had some affinity with the feeling which had inspired Cranford and the earlier chapters of Mary Barton” (Eliot Letters 3: 198)—and a debt to Trollope—claiming she was “not at all sure that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for Middlemarch, or that I should, through all its episodes, have persevered with it to the close” (qtd. in Tracy, Later Novels 68).

158 In “The Victorian Novel and its Readers,” Kate Flint suggests that the Victorian novel’s widespread appeal hinged on its promise of “a particular type of satisfaction”—the satisfaction “of underlying order and coherence, of knowability” (30)—suggesting that such attempts to rediscover and reconstruct a sense of order were contributing factors to the novel’s rise in popularity in the nineteenth century. Ironically, these were precisely the factors that prompted the following generation to dismiss Victorian literature and its greatest practitioner as too didactic, too earnest, too conservative, too naïve, and too serious. The early twentieth century’s attitude towards Eliot is summed up by Lord David Cecil’s comment that, although “a great writer” whose achievement stands at “the gateway between the old novel and the new,” she seems to embody—“to sum up and concentrate”—“all the dowdiness, 154 reputation pre-Daniel Deronda and the reception of Adam Bede suggests, her early fiction was widely felt to offer readers a sense of stability and certainty that helped to settle and comfort them within their own unstable and uncertain world.159

In particular, as the forces of modernity transformed the English landscape socially, politically, and geographically, a central component of Eliot’s success was, as many critics both past and present have pointed out, the past provincial world she so vividly depicted in these early narratives. Explaining the appeal of this rural environment for the Victorians, McDonagh writes that Eliot’s “visions of organic village life, in Shepperton, Hayslope, or Raveloe…presented an idealized social order and way of life, and, at the same time, a memorial to a unified national past,” which, together, “stood as a corrective to the contemporary experience of migration, urbanization, and technological change” that were felt to be eroding traditional ways of life “in the changing world of imperial Britain” (“Early Novels” 40). In these novels, McDonagh explains, “[t]he association with the land is very important, for it implies that the society…is, in a sense, grounded in nature…[Eliot’s] ideal society gains considerable authority from these associations, as a permanent and natural or organic society, in contrast to new societies based on industrial wealth, perceived as being unnatural, or mechanical” (George Eliot 21-2).

ponderousness, and earnestness which we find most alien in the Victorian age” (qtd. in Adams 227). “Such portraits,” James Eli Adams tells us, “are staples of Eliot’s reception through World War II” at which time a “major revaluation” led by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition was undertaken (227-8). For more on this reception, see Adams’ “The Reception of George Eliot.”

159 Since her death in 1880, critics have divided Eliot’s novels into the categories of “early” and “late,” or those works produced before and those produced after Romola. Although the division is not necessarily as well-defined as such labels would suggest—particularly given the continuity of themes, motifs, and even character types that McDonagh reminds us are present across all of Eliot’s fiction (“Early Novels” 39)—many critics have agreed that there is a discernable shift that takes place in Eliot’s fiction from Romola forward, one that manifests itself in the increasing complexity and dissatisfaction in the environments and the narratives of the later works. That said, until Daniel Deronda, these later works still ultimately comfort the reader—offering reassurance through the production of what Gillian Beer describes as “an infinitely knowable world,” one that is historicized and interpreted for the reader (169). For an early discussion of the division between Eliot’s early and late works see Leslie Stephen’s final assessment of Eliot, published in the Cornhill in 1881; for more recent discussions see McDonagh’s “The Early Novels” and Alexander Welsh’s “The Later Novels,” both of which are published in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot.

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Significantly, such “visions” of the rural past were not intended as a nostalgic retreat from the uncertain, increasingly urban and industrial present (although they do possess an undeniable nostalgia160), but rather as a cultural remedy—“a corrective”—for it; and, we saw in the early responses to Adam Bede just how psychically “sooth[ing]” readers found “the atmosphere of…old-world country life” to be in their own present lives, producing as they did a sense of place that was at once familiar, knowable, and secure (Stephen 470).

However, it wasn’t merely private moments (and memories) of comfort and certainty that these narratives of “old-world country life” offered their readers; rather, by presenting readers with a “vision” of a “unified national past” located—grounded—in the rural (yet geographically central) Midlands during the first decades of the century, Eliot’s novels rooted England’s uncertain present in a stable, cohesive, and knowable landscape of the past, giving the present both a secure point of origin and a “centre for national feeling” around which readers could imaginatively and affectively cohere (Helsinger 217)—much as Gaskell and Trollope had done with their literary landscapes in their works. Indeed, as Elizabeth Helsinger notes, “Eliot herself encouraged a reading of her principal subject, life in a still largely rural section of England, as representatively and centrally English” (218). And, by drawing on her childhood memories and knowledge of local customs and folklore,161 setting her narratives at widely-recognized moments

160 As McDonagh points out, despite Eliot’s “avowed intent to document country life without any romanticization...the scenes she describes are frequently green and sun-drenched” creating a strong sense of nostalgia for this idyllic past (“Early Novels” 40-1). Eliot’s regular deployment of a retrospective narrative voice tended to enhance this nostalgic mood even as it implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) bridged the divide between the past and the present.

161 In her journal Eliot notes that Scenes was planned “as a series of stories, containing sketches drawn from my own observation of the clergy” (Eliot Letters 2: 407-8), while “the germ of “Adam Bede” was an anecdote told me by my Methodist Aunt Samuel…an anecdote from her own experience” (502). The “germ” of The Mill on the Floss is her own childhood and relationship with her brother as “she clearly based aspects of the young Maggie and Tom Tulliver on Mary Ann and Isaac Evans and the Dodson sisters on her own aunts, the Pearson sisters” (Henry 113). Notably, despite these real-world inspirations, Eliot firmly denied that there was “any one-to-one relationship between real people and characters she created in her fiction” (113); for a detailed discussion of the complex relationship between Eliot’s past and her fiction see Henry’s Life.

156 of momentous national change,162 focusing on the material realities and domestic lives of ordinary men and women,163 and using an omniscient narrator with a voice and vision that united both characters with readers and the past with the present,164 Eliot produced narratives that appeared so authentic, authoritative, and representative—so “particular and yet generalizable”

(Plotz 75)—that they were read by the Victorians as accurate records of “their own national childhood, their social, political, and cultural inheritance”—of, that is, their roots (Henry 23).165

This shared, stable “childhood” or past—and the present national identity it in turn helped to establish—did not, however, come without costs. In her chapter on Eliot’s “Risky History” in

Rural Scenes and National Representation, Helsinger explains that in order to put such scenes

“at the center of a nationalizing culture as touchstones of moral sense and social stability” and thus create a stable and cohesive national history and identity for her present, Eliot, like Gaskell before her, had to cover up the incongruous and unsettling experiences of otherness and

162 In particular Eliot’s provincial stories are set either at the turn of the century (“Mr Gilfil’s Love Story,” Adam Bede, and Silas Marner) or in the years immediately preceding the First Reform Bill (1832) (The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Felix Holt) and the New Poor Law (1834) (“The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” and “Janet’s Repentance”), pivotal moments “at which changes in the organization of commerce, or the law, or developments in science and technology take place, or at which the political structure of the entire nation is on the brink of change” (McDonagh, George Eliot 7).

163 Eliot’s famous defense of realism in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede argues the need to depict “common, coarse people” for, she tells us: “In this world there are so many…people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful that we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things…” (162).

164 As Helsinger points out, Eliot’s omniscient narrator offered readers a totalizing, cohesive history by subsuming different voices (experiences, stories) into its authoritative voice; indeed, “the first-person plural of Eliot’s distinctive authorial voice” produces “a national “we” to which the reader is called to assent” (216)—much like Dickens’s sweeping “we” in Household Words, Gaskell’s inclusive “we” in Cranford, and Trollope’s congenial “we” in the Chronicles of Barsetshire—thus we become part of (and complicit in) the history being written. At the same time, “by setting her novels in England’s past, she could narrate in the present tense but with a knowledge of the nation’s future,” as Nancy Henry notes (25), effectively entwining the past with the present and emphasizing the influence of the former on the latter.

165 As Helsinger notes, Adam Bede, in particular, presents itself as a “condensed version of England’s history” (224), which, in narrating “the emergence of a Victorian middle class from an older rural England,” produces a “continuity” between past and present that in turn produces a “collective identity” (233), a fact which may explain why it remained such a favourite with Eliot’s readers throughout the Victorian period.

157 alienation found within such sites (218), much as she does in Adam Bede when she exiles the transgressive, troubling Hetty Sorrel from Hayslope’s present and, with her death, from

England’s future.166 Of course, exile and death are simply the most explicit ways in which internal otherness is denied; far more subtle—and effective—is the cultivation of imaginative sympathy in these early works. To explain: although Eliot is committed to showing the real material conditions—the “definite, substantial realit[ies]”—that shape the individual lives of common Englishmen and women, her early-expressed hope that “those who read [her writings] should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves” (Eliot Letters 3: 111)—that her readers should be able to empathize with the others she writes of—implicitly looks “to similarities rather than to differences as the basis of one’s ethical relationship to the other” and, by extension, as the basis of community (Albrecht 392, emphasis added). As in Gaskell’s texts, this assumption of commonality, of similarity, is also a denial of the distinctiveness of the other—of that which renders the other other. Such empathy effectively eliminates or covers differences between individuals within a community in order to produce one dominant identity: as readers imagine and feel (or rather, imagine they can feel) the experiences of those who “differ from” them, they internalize the other and eradicate the uniqueness of the other’s experiences and differences from themselves167—a process that

166 Hetty is just one of many such “cover ups” and, as Christina Crosby has argued, “in Eliot’s fiction…the other of history is most consistently imagined as women, exiled from history to underwrite its saving [totalizing] truth” (Helsinger 221). Not all women are exiled, however, only the sexually transgressive ones such as Eppie’s mother and Maggie Tulliver (who, like Hetty, are exiled by death); instead, as Helsinger points out, some of Eliot’s female characters “choose the supporting roles offered to them” and are thus liminally included in history as helpmeets to their husbands, the “heroes of [England’s] future” (characters like Dinah, Esther, and Dorothea) (224). Of course, this “choice” effectively erases them from history as well and, like Dorothea, they end up living “hidden [lives]” and lying in “unvisited tombs” (M 785).

167 This reading of Eliot’s imaginative sympathy is indebted to Thomas Albrecht ‘s article on cosmopolitan ethics in Daniel Deronda, which emphasizes the violence of an ethics based on the presumption of commonality. Specifically, in his analysis of Eliot’s hope that “those who read [her writings] should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves,” Albrecht claims, There is a subtle shift of emphasis [marked by Eliot’s italics] from difference as such to understanding or imagining difference…Fundamentally, this shift moves from an ethics based on acknowledging difference 158 explains how Eliot’s educated, middle- and upper-class readers, readers like Jane Carlyle and

Queen Victoria, could imagine hearing, in the working-class narrative of Adam Bede, “the voice of their own experience.”168

While Helsinger compellingly (and, to my mind, accurately) argues that “Eliot’s novels contradict their own project of creating a cohesive national identity” by self-consciously

“register[ing] painful memories of exclusion, and more dangerously, of complicity in excluding others, at the centre of images meant to bridge difference and construct a new national community” (236, emphasis added)—by, that is, recording alternative “histories” such as Hetty’s and showing how such others are excluded (often, as Helsinger claims, through embrace: a physical representation of sympathy)—she concedes that Eliot’s provincial novels nevertheless acquired “the remarkable cultural centrality they seem designed”—indeed, were designed—“to occupy” and have, since their publication, been celebrated (and critiqued169) for their conservative vision of England’s rural roots and national unity (218). It is, however, precisely this comfortable, conservative, coherent, and overbearing vision—and the confident

to an ethics based on the presumption of a (potential) connection or commonality. This is because the latter emphasis, in attempting to apprehend the other’s difference, inadvertently negates that difference at the moment it presumes its potential intelligibility, visibility, and tangibility. The other ceases to be wholly other once he or she is presumed to be potentially accessible to one’s imagination, touch, or understanding. (394)

168 Indeed, as Mary Jean Corbett argues, “the power of Adam Bede for its middle-class audience resides in its power to represent successfully a particular desire very much in the material and psychological interests of its readership: the real economic and social differences that appear to divide class from class are illusory” (292). Accordingly, “Adam Bede does not unsettle these readers; it comforts them by representing the working-class other as “just like us,” or, at the very least, capable of becoming so” (292, emphasis added).

169 One of the most insightful, nuanced, and influential of these critiques is Raymond Williams’s account of Eliot’s “knowable community” in The Country and the City. Here he credits Eliot for bringing “into focus” rural classes, landscapes, and experiences “that had previously been excluded or blurred” from earlier representations (166), but claims that, in the end, she can only make the rural world knowable to her readers (and herself) “in a deeply inauthentic” manner that obscures the very rural realities she purports to depict (170). Such criticisms of Eliot’s troubling (because obscuring) depiction of rural England did not, however, have to wait until the twentieth century to be made: as my next chapter argues, Thomas Hardy was intensely critical of Eliot’s depiction of rural England, which he considered idealized and inauthentic, and crafted his own novels as a response to the popularity of such depictions.

159 complacency such a way of seeing produced—that I believe Eliot challenges in and with her last novel.

This shift in Eliot’s aesthetic and agenda—her challenge to the comfortable, stable subject position produced by her earlier works—is readily illustrated via a brief comparison of the openings of Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda. The first passage will be recognized as coming from the earlier work, the second from the later:

The afternoon sun was warm on the five workmen there, busy upon doors and window-

frames and wainscoting. A scent of pinewood from a tent-like pile of planks outside the

open door mingled itself with the scent of the elder-bushes which were spreading their

summer snow close to the open window opposite; the slanting sun-beams shone though

the transparent shavings that flew before the steady plane, and lit up the fine grain of oak

paneling which stood propped against the wall. On a heap of those soft shavings a rough

grey shepherd-dog had made himself a pleasant bed, and was lying with his nose between

his fore-paws, occasionally wrinkling his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the five

workmen, who was carving a shield in the centre of a wooden mantelpiece. It was to this

workman that the strong baritone belonged which was heard above the sound of plane

and hammer… (AB 5)

Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which

gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in

those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of

undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing

in which the whole being consents? (DD 3) 160

Both excerpts are, for all intents and purposes, the second paragraph of their respective work, each beginning the story proper following a meta-textual reflection on art (the first paragraph in

Adam Bede about the sorcerer’s mirror and the author’s ink, and the first chapter epigraph in

Daniel Deronda about the fictiveness of all beginnings); yet, despite this similarity, the focus, tone, style, and effect of each paragraph are dramatically different, and, in their differences, gesture towards the radical shift in Eliot’s aesthetic and aims. The passage from Adam Bede is saturated with concrete details—the afternoon sun, five workmen, doors, window-frames, wainscoting, pinewood planks, an open door, elder-bushes, an open window, and so on—all of which together help us build a clear, solid image of the scene in our mind’s eye.170 It is not, however, only our vision that is engaged in bringing this scene and the world to which it belongs before us; the passage appeals to nearly all of our senses: the warm sun and soft shavings appeal to our sense of touch, of physical feeling, the scents of pinewood and of elder-bushes appeal to our sense of smell, and, finally, the strong baritone and the sound of plane and hammer appeal to our sense of hearing. While certainly mediated through the visual (via the written word that we see/read and the images described), the world of Adam Bede is made both solid and substantial and familiar and knowable through these sensory details—details that collectively encourage us to realize, to recognize, the scene through our own sensory experiences and memories (of the warm sun, the smell of pine, the sound of hammers, etcetera).171 At the same time, the

170 In fact, this scene deploys what Elaine Scarry, in Dreaming by the Book, has identified as a central technique used by authors to create the impression of solidity, of vivacity, in their fictions: passing a transparent, ephemeral image across the surface of another image which, while equally transparent because imagined, takes on a concreteness, a solidity, by implicit comparison with the transparency of the other (in Eliot’s passage the slanting sun-beam and transparent shavings make the plane, paneling, and wall that they pass across seem, by comparison, solid). This device, Scarry points out, occurs most frequently when “the newborn fictional worlds are most fragile and at risk because they are just in the midst of coming into being” (15); thus, Eliot’s use of this technique so early in her novel can be inferred as an attempt to confirm the solidity of her fictional world for her readers right away.

171 In “Walk this Way: Invitation, Prohibition, and Realist Space in Adam Bede,” Audrey Jaffe notes that, in the realist novel, all such sensory experiences are translated into text, thereby reinforcing “the predominance of the visual in social life.” While not disputing dominance of the visual, nor even the text’s transformation of the non- visual into the visual, my reading holds that the non-visual sensory experiences described rely on and stimulate the 161 pleasantness of these details (bright, warm, soft, fresh) imbues the scene and the reading experience with a sense of tranquility and comfort. This sense is furthered by the narrator’s clear, direct tone, which is at once confident and candid as it describes for us this simple rustic scene.

All in all, this is a novel-world we are made to feel comfortable in and certain about—one in which we are “at home.”

The passage from Daniel Deronda is, in contrast, strikingly lacking in both concrete and sensory details; in fact, it is a paragraph without anything concrete in it at all—even the “she” under scrutiny remains indefinite: a series of broad, antithetical abstractions (beautiful or not beautiful? good or evil?) rather than a discernable, knowable entity. In addition to not knowing who we are looking at, we have no idea where (or when) we are or what is going on—we aren’t even certain who is asking these questions (a character? the narrator? us? some mixture of the three?). We are given nothing solid or substantial through which to either recognize or realize this world. And, although our uncertainty finds expression in the hesitant, uncertain syntax that marks the questions asked (“was she…? and what…? probably…”), their very existence marks the uncertainty of this world—a place where binary oppositions have broken down and the difference between that which is beautiful and that which is not (and, more perplexingly, that which is good and that which is evil) is no longer clear. Indeed, as we read Daniel Deronda’s opening paragraph, we are made to feel neither comfortable nor certain about the novel’s world or anything in it.

Our relation to these texts and the worlds therein is further established by the manner in which we as readers are recognized and positioned within them. The opening of Adam Bede invites us—guides us, entices us—into the world of the novel (note the open door and the open reader’s memory of such experiences, and are thus transformed back from text into sensations—or memories of sensations—within the reader’s body. Gettelman’s claim that Eliot deliberately encourages readers “to recollect [personal] experiences which have nothing to do with reading, in order to fill in unnarratable, real-life aspects of the story” (“Reading Ahead” 26) supports this reading which, although not specifically about physical memories, does not exclude them. 162 window) where we, like the workers, are situated in clear relation to that world: they are actors, we, like the narrator, are observers; they are in the workshop, we, alongside the narrator, are looking into the workshop. The opening of Daniel Deronda, on the other hand, coerces us— forces us—into a particular subject position that is not our own, using free indirect discourse

(which, notably, is unidentifiable as such at this moment of reading since we have no knowledge of the focalizer) to conflate our perspective, our consciousness, with that of the unknown voice asking the questions. Where Adam Bede encourages us to stand back and observe from the comfortable certainty of our own subject position (one that is made up of and confirmed by our sensory experiences and memories), Daniel Deronda demands we give up that position—denies, perhaps, that we even have such a position—and compels us to engage with a world in which nothing is known and nothing seems certain—least of all our relation to it. If the beginning of a novel operates as a threshold through which our relation to the fictional world is established, then our relation to Adam Bede is one of comfort and certainty172—we know where we are, who we are, and what we are looking at—while our relation to Daniel Deronda is marked by discomfort, uncertainty, and confusion—we are, in the distressed terms of the critic at the Saturday Review,

“at sea.”

The difference between these openings is one that sets Daniel Deronda apart from all of

Eliot’s previous novels, each of which begins with a detailed description of either its setting (The

Mill on the Floss, Romola, Felix Holt) or its characters (Silas Marner, Middlemarch) as vivid and confident, as concrete and clear, as that of Adam Bede’s; in them we always understand

172 Jaffe notes that the “almost-too deferential welcome” into Adam Bede’s novel world “produces a movement in the opposite direction” of welcome, one that “transforms invitation into imperative” as the reader is permitted to walk—or rather, see—only where/what the narrator chooses; and, by accepting our invitation to enter the novel’s imagined space we are “accept[ing] realism’s prohibitions in exchange for its pleasures” (“Walk this Way”). That one of these pleasures is its prohibitions—the limits, order, and certainty of the novel’s world and the reader’s place within it—is, I suspect, one of the reasons the realist novel became the most popular novel genre in the nineteenth century.

163 where we are and who or what we are looking at, even if the characters do not themselves yet know. The formal deviance of Daniel Deronda’s opening thus becomes all the more startling as it deliberately unfolds in opposition to the reader’s well-established expectations of how a

George Eliot novel is supposed to begin, pointedly refusing to delineate its world in a manner that allows us to comfortably or confidently orient ourselves as spectators within it.173

That said, although Daniel Deronda opens rather unexpectedly, startling us with its bewildering questions, its dramatic possibilities, and its foreign setting, by the third chapter the reader alongside the novel’s English heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, have been whisked back to the

English countryside—back to what a critic for the Edinburgh Review once referred to as Eliot’s

“own region of provincial English life” (Venables 278)—and, for many, this geographic return reads as an aesthetic return to the comfortable, familiar realism of Eliot’s earlier works. As if confirming this to be true, our arrival is greeted by an oft-cited narratorial aside that appears to celebrate the provincial world of her earlier works and the comfortably cohesive, confident, and well-rooted identity produced therein:

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get

the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the

sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar and

unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the

definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance

with all neighbours, even dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and

173 In “Late Form” Alex Woloch points out that the deviance of Daniel Deronda’s opening is deliberately “heightened by its explicit thematic proximity to” the opening of its immediate precursor, Middlemarch (167). While both openings focus on the issue of female beauty, Middlemarch offers readers a much more conventional— much more certain—statement of fact about Dorothea’s appearance: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress” (7). By telling us rather than asking us about the beauty of the female protagonist who is, notably, identified, Middlemarch situates us, much as Adam Bede does, as observers, spectators to the world of the novel—a world that is, as its opening suggests, fundamentally knowable (at least to its readers). Daniel Deronda’s opening thus becomes all the more unsettling in its inverted echo of Middlemarch’s.

164

reflection, but as sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to

be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into

impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of

the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to

astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own

homestead. (DD 16)

Here, as in Eliot’s early works, geographic rootedness—a fixed and knowable point of origin—is held to lend stability to identity by providing one with a way of thinking, feeling, and being that affectively binds one to a specific place, people, and perspective “amidst the future widening of knowledge.” Somewhat like the opening to Adam Bede, such concrete beginnings firmly situate—settle—one in relation to the world, offering definiteness in the face of abstraction, knowledge in the face of the unknown, and familiarity in the face of the unfamiliar. It is unsurprising then, that this passage is often taken to signify Eliot’s continued commitment to both this rural foundation and the conservative, coherent (singular, known), and well-rooted identity engendered by it.

However, we need only consider the immediate context in which the passage is offered to see how incongruous, how atypical the logic and experience of such rootedness is in the modern, mobile, and cosmopolitan world of Daniel Deronda. Having returned her English heroine to

Offendene, the Harleth family’s recently rented (read: temporary) house in the English countryside, Eliot’s narrator pointedly offers this aside as a lament for what Gwendolen never had—“Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth’s childhood or endeared to her by family memories!” (16, emphasis added)—and, perhaps more significantly, never could have had since, as we’ve already been told by the novel’s famous opening epigraph a mere three chapters prior, all beginnings are essentially “make-believe” and that everything actually “sets off in 165 medias res” (3). By emphasizing their inherently artificial and arbitrary nature, this epigraph effectively undermines the logic of origins. In this context, the narrator’s longing for some place of origin, “some spot of native land” upon which one’s individual and national identity (which are, significantly, conceived as one and the same) is founded and formed, comes across as romantically futile and even somewhat absurd—rather like the narrator’s subsequent wish for the house itself “to have been lifted on a knoll” in order to provide its inhabitants with a more pleasing prospect (16). Such a desire is pleasing in theory perhaps but is impractical— impossible—in reality. Accordingly, given the novel’s contemporary setting (the narrative unfolds between October 1864 and October 1866, a mere ten years prior to its publication174) and

Eliot’s unprecedented emphasis on mobility, wandering, homelessness, and states of exile within it,175 geographic rootedness appears to be, as John Rignall suggests, “a thing of the past, an object of nostalgia rather than the common condition of existence” (148)—it is, in other words, a concept that is no longer suited to the present-day reality. The incongruity of the narrator’s celebration of geographic rootedness is, however, not only the result of the fact that such homey settlement—such stable, rooted comfort in relation to one’s world—no longer seems to be “the common condition of existence” (regardless of whether it ever truly was), but, more significantly, of the sense that it is no longer desirable or appropriate in or for the dynamic, mobile, heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world of Daniel Deronda and its readers.

174 Daniel Deronda is the only of Eliot’s novels to be set in such immediate proximity to her readers’ present, a fact that was emphasized by Lewes in his request that it be advertised as “like ‘Middlemarch,’” “a story of English life but of our own day” (Eliot Letters 6: 193).

175 While characters do travel in Eliot’s previous novels—Hetty in search of Arthur, Maggie down the river with Stephen, Dorothea to Rome with Casaubon, for instance—“the majority of the significant action” in these novels is, as McDonagh points out, “located firmly in one location (usually a provincial town such as Middlemarch, Treby Magna, or St Oggs)” and characters tend to be explained “in terms of their positions within a fairly closed social world”; in Daniel Deronda this is no longer the case as characters “roam between towns and countries and continents, shiftless and exiled, like the Jewish race which provides the thematic focus for the novel” (George Eliot 74).

166

In her influential study of Victorian cosmopolitanism, The Powers of Distance, Amanda

Anderson argues that in Daniel Deronda, “Eliot advocates a form of cultural self-understanding” premised on achieving “reflective distance” and partial disengagement from one’s cultural origins—one’s roots—so that one can develop a “cultivated partiality” for them (121) that is at once “a means to self-fulfillment” and “the basis for an ever-expanding horizon of ethical and political engagement” (119, emphasis added). Accordingly, in the celebration of rootedness that opens chapter three of Daniel Deronda, we can see how roots are envisioned as a point of origin from which we “blindly begin,” a place where we “get nourished at least for a time” as we prepare “to soar above preference into impartiality” and become self-aware “citizens of the world”; one is, it would seem, never meant to remain rooted in the place—or identity—of one’s childhood/past. In this paradigm, Anderson explains, rootedness “ideally serve[s] as the affective foundation for the reflectiveness that allows one to become a “citizen of the world”” (138). Here,

“ideally serves” seems to be crucial: what such an ideal effectively obscures is the powerful appeal of remaining rooted, instead taking for granted an inherent desire to “soar above preference” and become a “citizen of the world.”

Accordingly, throughout Daniel Deronda the achievement of the critical distance and impartiality necessary to become such a citizen is contrasted with and, arguably, impeded by the

“romanticized nationalist rhetoric” of geographical rootedness that is deployed with such longing in chapter three’s opening and, again, with such urgency in Mordecai’s impassioned nationalist lectures later in the novel (138).176 Not only does such rhetoric “attempt to bypass the recognition that cultivated partiality…fundamentally alters one’s relation to the forces of tradition that define identity,” promoting instead “the dangerous illusion” of cultural

176 As Anderson explains, Mordecai’s nationalism, with his dream of founding a geo-political Jewish nation, “follows the collectivist-romantic model issuing out of German idealism, and built on the…troubling model of a unified national will and a projected national destiny” (123).

167 permanence, as Anderson points out (138), but, in the romantic (comfortable, secure, familiar, knowable) vision of home it offers, such rhetoric does little to inspire one to question or leave that home or the outlook it gives shape to (in fact, it does everything to inspire one to love it and remain bound to it), effectively making that “dangerous illusion” of cultural permanence into a more likely reality. In short, by producing such a stable, definite sense of identity, rootedness also threatens to produce a comfortable, confident complacency, a self-satisfied fixedness wherein people feel neither the need nor the desire to “soar above preference” and look beyond the narrow horizons—the “prejudice[s]”—of their native land. Thus, in the uncertain, unfamiliar, and ever-changing modern world, the security of deep roots threatens to impede the development of a wider outlook and, rather than gaining the critical, reflective distance necessary to become

“citizens of the world,” the too well-rooted individual—community, nation—remains dangerously ensconced within and limited to (and by) that which they already know, that which they already are.

At first glance such stultifying, provincial roots do not, however, seem to be a problem for Daniel Deronda; rather, it is the rootlessness of the modern, cosmopolitan world that appears to be the problem the novel—or at least Deronda, guided by Mordecai177—sets out to solve. In fact, the ending of the novel is frequently read as an effort on the part of both Eliot and her hero

“to “root” people in their “native land[s]”” (McDonagh, George Eliot 75): after all, not only does

Eliot have Deronda send the newly-widowed Gwendolen back to England with the vague wish that, by thinking only of others, particularly those immediately around her, she “will find [her] life growing like a plant”—rooted in one spot from which she will draw nourishment, purpose,

177 Anderson compelling argues that Deronda’s relationship to Mordecai (and romantic nationalism) is more ambivalent than is generally acknowledged; Deronda becomes a Zionist, but insists on questioning, challenging, and reflecting on the teachings and values of Mordecai, his father, and Judaism rather than blindly accepting them. As George Levine explains it, “[h]is relation to nationalism is “reflective and dialogical” rather than visionary and essential” (Dying 190). That said, Deronda’s thinking and actions are still deeply influenced by Mordecai’s teachings and beliefs. 168 comfort, and meaning (DD 658); but, having discovered his own racial/cultural heritage,

Deronda also announces his plans to go “to the East” to “become better acquainted with the condition of [his] race in various countries there” in the hopes of eventually “restoring a political existence to [his] people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the

English have” (688)—to, that is, root the Jewish people in a particular place. Yet, for neither of these characters—nor for the national plotline each represents—do these solutions, these futures, appear to hold much promise. For Gwendolen and the English plot, such a future is undermined by the fact that it appears at once “utterly desolate” (G. Levine, Dying 177)—emptied of all passion, desire, hope, ambition, and individuality—and entirely punitive: a merciless punishment for her youthful egotism, vanity, and ambition. For Deronda and the Jewish plot, such a solution is challenged not only by its limits—the fact that it is a solution for only a select few—but, more pointedly, by its striking irony in relation to Eliot’s undeniably “cynical and bleak” portrait of the national centre that Deronda announces as his model (G. Levine, Introduction 17). Indeed, it is precisely this dark portrait of England that reveals the limits and dangers of the well-rooted life that Deronda (and through him, Eliot) appears to advocate in Daniel Deronda; thus it is to this portrait we will now briefly turn.

III. A Puerile State of Culture: England’s Deep Roots and Narrow

Horizons

That Eliot’s penultimate piece of fiction is a work sharply critical of Victorian England has long been recognized,178 and her frustration and disillusionment with England at the time of

178 As George Levine points out, “throughout the novel…George Eliot’s portrait of English society is uncharacteristically cynical and bleak” (Introduction 17) and, while such cynicism and bleakness does not necessarily translate to the “anti-English bias” Barbra Hardy sees in Daniel Deronda (qtd. in Linehan 323), it does point towards Eliot’s “genuine dissatisfaction” with “the direction she saw her society” going (Linehan 324)—a 169

Daniel Deronda’s composition is conveyed in no uncertain terms in a well-known letter sent to

Harriet Beecher Stowe shortly after the novel’s volume publication. After criticizing her nation’s widespread ignorance, “arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness…not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples”—attitudes which she explicitly holds to be “a national disgrace”—Eliot exasperatedly declares that England’s “inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity, which is still the average mark of our culture” (Eliot

Letters 6: 301-2, emphasis added). According to Eliot, England’s lack of interest in anything or anyone outside of or different from itself—a lack Eliot’s previous novels, like those of Gaskell and Trollope, had arguably contributed to with their exclusive (and excluding) pictures of

English life—had resulted in not only an ignorance of and sense of superiority to other, particularly non-Western, cultures and perspectives, but also in a national narrowness, a deep provincialism that Eliot feared would result, was resulting, in a stagnant and “puerile state of culture” that would become, was becoming, increasingly dangerous to both its own and other cultures (DD 39).

And she was right; although England’s “national centre” provided the English with a representative spot of native land to which its citizens were imaginatively and ideologically rooted—their identity stabilized and cohered in the face of modernity’s disruptions and dispersions—it also produced feelings of arrogance, superiority, intolerance, and entitlement that implicitly promoted and justified the nation’s violent, oppressive, and fundamentally self-serving

dissatisfaction that numerous critics, including Rachel Hollander, George Levine, and Katherine Bailey Linehan, have discussed in their studies of the novel.

170 imperialism,179 the practice of which Katherine Bailey Linehan has shown is thoroughly exposed as “a corrupting force in English national life” in Daniel Deronda (324). Yet, where Linehan focuses on the novel’s depiction of how the dynamics of imperialism corrupt English national life—on how, that is, “a nation’s public assumption of entitlement to invade, rule, and commodify the lands and peoples of the earth carries over, particularly in the ruling class, into a private-life mentality characterized by racism, mercenariness, and presumptions of innate entitlement to authority” (324, emphasis added)—she neglects to account for its consideration of how England’s deeply-rooted national life led to and justified the “public assumptions” of imperialism; Linehan thus misses the novel’s radical critique of English provincialism and the realist novel that celebrated and encouraged such provincialism. Claiming Eliot’s solution to “the corruptions wrought by imperialism” is the “restoration of an earlier and supposedly healthier form of patriarchy and nationalism” (which she argues is represented in the novel by Judaism),

Linehan ascribes to Eliot precisely the nostalgic longing for the rooted, provincial life I am arguing she struggles to discard in Daniel Deronda because of its limited and limiting horizon— its inability and unwillingness to see beyond itself (341).180 Indeed, rather than reinforcing

England’s roots, Eliot sets out “to widen the English vision” in Daniel Deronda (Eliot Letters 6:

304): first, by exposing how England’s too well-rooted sense of identity—its too firmly

179 Linehan concisely describes the practices of British imperialism when Daniel Deronda was written: [T]he prosperous third quarter of the nineteenth century in England marked a period of relative quiescence in the conduct of Empire…Interest was stronger in consolidating free trade profits through existing colonial holdings than in extending expensive military conquests. However, as we can see in retrospect, particularly with reference to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Jamaican Uprising of 1865, and Disraeli’s aggressive trade initiatives in the mid-1870s (most notably the Suez Canal Stock Purchases and the Royal Titles Bill), the period was also one in which England was simmering toward militaristic jingoism of late Empire. [In Daniel Deronda] Eliot…responded with keen sensitivity to two of the preconditions for the competitive European expansionism of later years: the national mania for profits and the resurgence of racism alongside the rising tide of nationalism. (325-6)

180 “For all the stifling aspects of provincialism revealed in Middlemarch,” writes Linehan, “there is yet in Eliot’s eyes a grace conferred by the image of an island nation still absorbed in its own affairs and an island people still drawing spiritual nourishment from rootedness in a well-loved place and well-loved past” (339-40).

171 established national centre—engenders the very arrogance and egotism, the contemptuousness and narrowness that gives rise to a destructive imperialist mentality, and then, by jarring her readers out of their own deeply-rooted and intellectually-limiting identity by pushing them beyond their readerly horizons of expectation and experience and purposely leaving them “at sea.”

Significantly, by focusing the “English half” of her novel on the English establishment, that land-owning class of titled aristocrats, MPs, and genteel hangers-on, Eliot overtly links her picture of provincial narrowness and national decay to the very people who possess the most symbolic and decisive ties to England’s national centre—to those who are, in other words, the most firmly established and the most well-rooted. Nowhere is this connection more vividly—or disturbingly—figured than in Eliot’s characterization of Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, the

“flaccid,” “faded” (DD 91) “presumptive heir” to the expansive Mallinger and Grandcourt estates (134). The product of “two equally old [English] families” (140), Grandcourt’s only interest appears to be in satisfying his own “peremptory will” (105): “he had,” the narrator tells us, “no imagination of anything…but what affected the gratification of his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like divination” (474). Languid and indifferent to everything and everyone but himself and his desires, it is, as Marc Wohlfarth puts it, “as if the last pulsations of his vitality concentrate themselves in the hard and pitiless exercise of a will wholly bent on securing his pleasure and domination” (191); and, in what is perhaps the most disturbing example of this “pitiless exercise of…will,” he pursues and marries Gwendolen simply because he wishes to “completely master” her, to bend her to that will (DD 256). A menacing metaphor for his class and culture, Grandcourt is frequently described as the only intrinsically evil character in Eliot’s oeuvre and, because of this inherent wickedness, he is frequently seen as violating the strictures of realism: he is a melodramatic monster rather than a 172 corrupted man.181 Yet, as “a born gentleman” (379), Grandcourt’s extreme egotism and sense of entitlement, are, as one of Linehan’s descriptions of him suggests, explicitly presented as the natural—that is, the all too realistic—products of his firmly-rooted, land-based identity: “He, with his four country estates, house in London, and two prospective titles, illustrates that aristocratic layer of the upper class for whom the possession of wealth and power is a hereditary prerogative” (330). As evil as he may be then, Grandcourt and his “peremptory will” are, like his oft-referenced reserve, simply an “extreme type of the national taste,” of, that is, the national character (DD 355), one distinctly born of and bound to his hereditary possession of “some spot of native land” from which he early learned to view “the nightly heavens”—and the world they shine down upon—as “belonging” wholly and rightfully to himself.

This deeply-rooted proprietorial attitude leads Grandcourt to treat the world like his own personal estate within which he can take, consume, and destroy anything he chooses—be it tigers in the East or women in the West. And because he never doubts his right to rule—“Why should

I?” he silently asks as he navigates his English yacht through international waters (578)—

Grandcourt exists in an entirely complacent (if aloof and cruel) relation to the world, remaining confident, secure, and unyielding in his position and authority within it. That his claim to supremacy is not challenged by his peers—is, in fact, reinforced by them as we see in their collective willingness to overlook what would, in a less ranked, less established individual, be

“inexcusable” habits (77)—only reinforces his arrogance and sense of entitlement; indeed, how could it not? Yet, as one would expect, this deeply-rooted, socially-reinforced egotism produces a self-satisfied, stagnant, even puerile state of being. Thus, despite his having “been everywhere and seen everything” (115), Grandcourt’s perspective remains “narrow [and] immovable”

(575)—parochial and rooted—because it is perpetually and exclusively fixed on himself and his

181 George Levine writes that, in creating “her one unequivocally evil man” in Grandcourt, Eliot “violates…the realist program” that has governed her previous works (Introduction 16-17). 173 desires. As the narrator explains, “Grandcourt’s view of things was considerably fenced in by his general sense, that what suited him, others must put up with” (509, emphasis added). In his myopic egotism then, Grandcourt has no “breadth of horizon” (39), to borrow Herr Klesmer’s complaint about English music (and, by explicit extension, about English culture); nor, would it seem, has he any capacity, desire, or, to his mind, need for such breadth. Rather disturbingly, as the novel’s representative of England’s future national centre (he is, after all, the novel’s quintessential heir—entirely unable to be mistaken for anything else [379]), Grandcourt embodies the cultural, political, and moral degeneration that so many Victorians (including Eliot) feared England was succumbing to in the last decades of the nineteenth century.182 Yet, rather than the threat coming from outside England’s borders (from the colonial other and the practice of imperialism), Eliot, through Grandcourt, implies that it comes from within—indeed, is deeply rooted in England’s own national body, which has been corrupted by the sense of entitlement, superiority, and absolute privilege that comes from a too well-rooted life.

While certainly the most extreme, Grandcourt is by no means the only English character

Eliot exposes as so well-rooted, so confident, complacent, and secure in his identity and position in the world as to be corrupted and limited by it; in fact, her far more subtle—but nonetheless critical—depictions of Gwendolen’s uncle, the Reverend Gascoigne, and Daniel’s guardian, Sir

Hugo Mallinger, suggest, in the rather ominous words of one contemporary reviewer, just how

“many men [are] more or less like Grandcourt” (Francillon 389).183 Given the more sensational

182 Claiming Grandcourt is “one of the first great decadent figures in English literature,” Marc Wohlfarth notes that Eliot drew many of his physical features directly from contemporary scientific discourse on the physiology of decadence which held that the “outer is the inner,” that the inner manifests itself on the outer, thus Grandcourt’s “baldness, sallow complexion, and drawl all testify to the inner worm of degeneration” (192). He is, then, a deliberately recognizable symbol of late nineteenth-century degenerative anxieties.

183 This comment must have come as a relief to Eliot who was “particularly anxious” about the “verisimilitude” of Grandcourt’s character after an early review “opined that the scenes between Lush and Grandcourt were…of the imperious feminine, not the masculine character”; this anxiety is manifest in a letter to Blackwood in which she indirectly seeks confirmation of her accuracy and realism in her depiction of Grandcourt: 174 characterization of Grandcourt, however, little critical attention has been paid to these two

English gentlemen,184 both of whose congenial, charming—even solicitous—personalities, seem to set them apart from the imperious, evil “young” heir (DD 75). I would suggest, however, that it is precisely the self-satisfied congeniality, jovial egotism, and confident certainty of these men that lays the ground for Grandcourt’s more malignant sense of supremacy and self-entitlement, thus making Eliot’s treatment of them central to the novel’s critique of English complacency and the corruption that such complacency engenders.

Even though the Reverend has risen to his rank while Sir Hugo, like Grandcourt, was born to his, both are Englishmen of property and position making them esteemed members of the

English Establishment and thus, like Grandcourt, representatives of England’s national centre.

However, where Grandcourt is the novel’s quintessential heir—an ominous look into the nation’s imminent future—these two men are its quintessential gentlemen—a seemingly propitious look at the nation’s present. Both men, Eliot makes clear, are supremely comfortable in their relation to the world: Gascoigne, we are told, possesses an “easy, pleasantly confident tone, which made the world in general seem a very manageable place of residence” (25-6), while Sir Hugo is described as one of those “good-natured men…[whose] life has been generally easy to themselves” (147-8). And for both, this ease reveals itself in their affability—which seems to manifest itself in their tolerance “of differences and defects” (134)—and their ability to smile

Mr. Lewes was chatting with a friend who, without having read the [criticism] or having the subject in the least led up to by Mr. Lewes, said that he had been at Lady Waldegraves’, where the subject of discussion had been “Deronda;” and Bernal Osborne, delivering himself on the book, said that the very best parts were the scenes between Grandcourt and Lush. Don't you think that Bernal Osborne has seen more of the Grandcourt and Lush life than that critic has seen? But several men of experience have put their fingers on those scenes as having surprising verisimilitude. (Eliot Letters 6: 240-1) Eliot’s concern suggests that, while Grandcourt may be an allegory of evil, he is very much intended as an allegory of a very real evil, one present in contemporary English society.

184 Two notable exceptions are Jean Sudrann’s article on “Daniel Deronda and the Landscape of Exile,” in which he devotes two paragraphs to the “comfortable illusions” that govern Gascoigne’s vision of the world (437), and Christina Crosby’s chapter on Daniel Deronda in The Ends of History, in which she briefly mentions the “killing stupidity” of both men in conjunction with Eliot’s condemnation of classical education, which Crosby argues Eliot associates with “English ignorance” and “death” (29). 175

“pleasantly at the foible of a taste which [they do] not share” (23). Such attributes suggest they have managed to “soar above preference into impartiality” unlike Grandcourt who, as we’ve seen, is partial to and tolerant of nothing but himself. And yet, this amiable acceptance of different points of view is, in both cases, qualified as quickly as it is set out: Gascoigne is tolerant of such differences, the narrator notes, simply “because he felt himself able to overrule them” (23), while Sir Hugo smiles pleasantly at them only so long as they don’t disrupt “the settlement of his family estates,” in which case they become “faults…less venial” (134). For both men, tolerance for others exists only so far as their own authority and position remain secure, and their ability to “overrule” (and therefore to rule) remains unchallenged. Such limits suggest that at the base of their easy-going, broad-minded temperaments is an intolerant egotism that will assert itself when threatened. This fundamental, if suppressed, intolerance for opposition implicitly places these men one step (or, more aptly perhaps, one generation) away from

Grandcourt, whose overt egotism, intolerance, and imperious attitude we are told, “might have won [him] reputation among his contemporaries” had he “been sent to govern a difficult colony” for he “would have understood that it was safer to exterminate than to cajole superseded proprietors, and would not have flinched from making things safe in that way” (507, emphasis added). In this horrifying scenario the superficially affable authority of a Reverend Gascoigne or a Sir Hugo has given way to the undeniably brutal imperiousness of a Henleigh Mallinger

Grandcourt as genocide, the supreme overruling—obliteration—of “difficult” others, becomes the acceptable means of ensuring the safety—the security, stability, certainty, and comfort—of one’s position.185

185 One cannot help but think of Mr Lush and “his love of ease”—a love which has led him to commit increasingly “bad actions” in his service to Grandcourt (which is really simply service to himself) without his ever recognizing that he has done so (DD 108).

176

Of course, neither Gascoigne nor Sir Hugo use, or show any inclination to use, violence to preserve their comfort and position (or rather, their comfortable positions);186 however, both are willing to spoil others to do so, whether wittingly or not. For instance, Sir Hugo, whose

“chief grievance…in…life” is his failure to have a son (and thus someone to inherit his property and position) (134), allows Deronda to grow up thinking himself his guardian’s bastard because it “pleased” the baronet to have others (including Deronda) suspect that Deronda is his (148).187

In a similarly selfish vein, Gascoigne, whose interest in social and political advancement leads him to “cultivate” friendships “likely to be useful” (24), encourages Gwendolen to marry

Grandcourt—despite his partial knowledge of Grandcourt’s “unfortunate experiments in folly”— because such a union would be “advantageous in the highest degree” to himself and his family

(118).188 Although there are certainly differences in the forms of the egotism that motivates these self-serving acts of “kindness”—Sir Hugo’s being more self-indulgent and oblivious,

Gascoigne’s more calculating and self-promoting—neither man perceives his actions as harmful or selfish because both believe the results are mutually beneficial; after all, while Sir Hugo gets to imagine he has a handsome, intelligent son, Daniel gets to grow up as an English gentleman, and while Gascoigne gets to claim a future peer for a nephew, Gwendolen gets to be the wife of a

186 Nor, in fact, does Grandcourt, who instead relies on (and “delights in” [DD 366]) psychological torture, which creates, as Gwendolen silently calls it, an “empire of fear” (364). The threat of violence is, however, always present and we know, should the impulse arise, he wouldn’t hesitate to order his “dogs…kicked” (107).

187 Whether Deronda is “spoiled” by this belief or not is, of course, debatable since the text makes it clear that it is precisely this “sense of injury” that gives rise to his “hatred of all injury” and the “mastering affectionateness” which are the roots of his sympathy (DD 151). However, as Audrey Jaffe has argued, such sympathy—which is essentially “anger transformed”—not only “lacks passion” but is fundamentally self-serving: Deronda sympathizes only with those who are like him, longing, as he does, to discover (and define) his own identity (Sympathy 149). Thomas Albrecht makes a similar point about “the fundamental narcissism of Daniel’s empathy” in ““The Balance of Separateness and Communication”: Cosmopolitan Ethics in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda” (406).

188 Notably, Sir Hugo, whose knowledge of Grandcourt’s “follies” is presumably more extensive than Gascoigne’s, is also in favour of the marriage because, in his mind, Gwendolen’s “appearance on the scene has bettered [his] chance of getting Diplow,” the entailed family property he hopes to purchase from Grandcourt for his wife and daughters (DD 138). This willingness to gain at the cost (or loss) of another—particularly another who is unknown—is, of course, the logic that guides both gambling and imperialism, both of which the novel exposes as corrupting modern life; on the dangers of such logic see Carolyn Lesjak’s “Labours of a Modern Storyteller.”

177 future peer. Unlike the competitive logic of imperialism, which allows gain only at another’s loss

(logic Grandcourt tellingly relishes), Sir Hugo and Reverend Gascoigne genuinely believe their practices enable fair, if not equal, gain to all.

However, Eliot makes it clear that their belief in such equality is predicated on either an unconscious ignorance of another’s reality, as is the case with Sir Hugo, whose “imagination had never once been troubled with the way in which the boy [Deronda] himself might be affected…by the enigmatic aspect of his circumstances” (148); or a conscious arrogance of presuming to know what is best for everyone, as is the case with Gascoigne, whose “mode of speech always conveyed a thrill of authority, as of a word of command: it seemed to take for granted that there could be no wavering in the audience, and that everyone was going to be rationally obedient” (118). The world is thus shown to be “a very manageable place” for these men because, to their way of seeing—which is, in their minds, the only (rational) way of seeing—their management benefits everyone, a belief which in turn has the rather circular effect of justifying and encouraging such management. That those around them (their wives, their neighbours, their peers) perpetually applaud and defer to their management merely strengthens this conceit. Eliot, however, highlights the fallacy (and irony) of this mode of thinking in an early narratorial aside that reminds us how “men after dining well often agree that the good of life is distributed with wonderful equality” (138). Indeed, such self-satisfied and self-satisfying logic enables both Englishmen to believe that they possess a liberal breadth of horizon189 when in reality both are, like Grandcourt, marked by an “intellectual narrowness,” a “stupidity” that leaves them unable to see beyond themselves—or even the need to try.

189 In fact, both men appear to pride themselves on the breadth of their horizons: Sir Hugo, claiming to “feel the better…for having spent a good deal of time abroad,” asserts his sense of himself as something of a cosmopolitan who has managed to “[doff] some of [his] national prejudices”; however, he undermines this image when he warns Deronda to be sure to “keep an English cut” during his own travels (DD 156). Gascoigne assumes no such cosmopolitanism; however, he does pride himself on “looking at things from every point of view”—something made easy when all points of view always appear to be in accord with your own (30).

178

Congenial and tolerant as Sir Hugo and Gascoigne may seem, Eliot’s characterization of these English every(gentle)men exposes the deep provincialism and arrogant complacency of

England’s national centre. Moreover, it reveals how such narrowness and insularity is unwittingly “spoiling” England’s present and future life by closing England off from other points of view and possibilities, and cultivating its unfounded (yet deeply-rooted) sense of righteousness, supremacy, authority, and entitlement—sentiments which, as the roots grow deeper, ultimately produce such irredeemably corrupted, indeed, evil, figures as Grandcourt. And yet, while these three men are at the centre of Eliot’s “cynical and bleak” critique of Victorian

England’s deeply-rooted narrowness, arrogance, and complacency in Daniel Deronda

(representing, as they do, its national centre), it is Gwendolen Harleth’s selfish narrowness, egocentric ambition, and imperious arrogance that are made the primary focus of Daniel

Deronda’s English plot. This spoiled, “selfish[,] and ignorant” girl is placed at the centre of the

English plot because, for all her frustration about England’s complacent, corrupting present, Eliot retained hope for its future—a sense that something could be done to dislodge such complacency, widen English vision, and save it from spoiling itself—and, as I will argue,

Gwendolen, for all her faults, represents this hope (383).

Significantly, Gwendolen’s egotism is somewhat different from Gascoigne’s, Sir Hugo’s, and Grandcourt’s: unlike these men she is, as has already been mentioned, not well-rooted, making hers an example of the more “common condition of existence”—the one shared by the majority of her contemporaries/Eliot’s readers. Having spent her life to-date “roving” around

Western Europe, Gwendolen’s representative rootlessness is exacerbated by the fact that she is an unmarried woman with a dead father whose titled family “takes no notice” of her (17). In spite of this rootlessness, however, Gwendolen appears to possess a sense of self—or, rather, a sense of self-entitlement—as firmly rooted and egocentric as that of any land-owning, socially- 179 established English gentlemen190—one that is famously reflected in the mirror into which she gazes when she prepares to leave Leubronn after hearing of her family’s loss of fortune:

[H]appening to be seated sideways before the long strip of mirror between her two

windows she turned to look at herself, leaning her elbow on the back of the chair in an

attitude that might have been chosen for her portrait. It is possible to have a strong self-

love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense

because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care; but Gwendolen

knew nothing of such inward strife. She had a naïve delight in her fortunate self, which

any but the harshest saintliness will have some indulgence for in a girl, who had every

day seen a pleasant reflection of that self in her friends’ flattery as well as in the looking-

glass. And even in this beginning of troubles, while for lack of anything else to do she sat

gazing at her image in the growing light, her face gathered a complacency gradual as the

cheerfulness of the morning. Her beautiful lips curled into a more and more decided

smile, till at last she took off her hat, leaned forward and kissed the cold glass which had

looked so warm. (12-3)

Founded on her beauty, confirmed daily by the self-serving admiration and flattery that comes from “friends” like Grandcourt, Gascoigne, and Mallinger, Gwendolen’s “naïve delight in her fortunate self” renders her confident and complacent—even in the face of her family’s ruin; when she kisses her reflection in this scene, we are presented with an obvious image of her narcissism and egotism. Notably, however, this is an image that comes into being as the passage unfolds and the morning light grows: “her face gathered a complacency gradual as the cheerfulness of the morning. Her beautiful lips curled into a more and more decided smile.”

190 In fact, early in the novel, Eliot compares Gwendolen to an “unscrupulous male” whose “strong determination to have what was pleasant…[and] total fearlessness in making [himself] disagreeable or dangerous when [he] did not get it”—in other words, his “inborn energy of egoistic desire, and [his] power of inspiring fear”—ensures his rule over “the weak females of [his] household” (33). 180

And, as this image becomes more complacent and decided, more pleased with and established in itself, so too does the girl looking at it, “till at last she…leaned forward and kissed the cold glass”—until, in other words, she claims the image as her own, as herself. Gwendolen’s literal and figurative embracing of this image/herself suggests less a “naïve delight in her fortunate self” than a deliberate construction of her fortunate self, one that only comes into being through a dynamic exchange with an external force—here, her reflection. The closed, inherently solipsistic nature of this particular “exchange” is telling for it is Gwendolen herself who confirms the existence of her fortunate self, suggesting the fundamental stagnation of that self. Indeed, much like the circular, self-gratifying logic and peer support that fallaciously justifies and reinforces both Sir Hugo and Gascoigne’s congenial selfishness and Grandcourt’s arrogant imperiousness,

Gwendolen’s mirror-logic will not—cannot—see beyond itself, leaving Gwendolen, like her male counterparts, in a state of “intellectual narrowness” and “stupidity.”

And yet the fact that Gwendolen’s self has to be confirmed—that it has to come into being—suggests its inherent instability and, from the novel’s opening question forward,

Gwendolen’s character is shown to be both dynamic and uncertain: traits that pointedly set her apart from her too firmly-established male counterparts. Not only does her beauty resist consensus for those who speculate upon it (and thereby speculate upon her),191 but Gwendolen herself can’t quite seem to decide who she is, and adopts “a new rôle” whenever the impulse strikes or the situation suits (9). During the first three chapters alone, Gwendolen imagines herself “a goddess of luck” while she is winning at the roulette table (6), a “bored” cynic after she loses (9), “Saint Cecilia” when seated at an organ (20), and a “princess in exile” as she rules

191 For instance, in the opening scene of the novel we are told that Mr Vandernoodt believes her to be “very” pretty, while a dowager holds her to be “odious”; another observer acknowledges her to be “very graceful. But…want[ing] a tinge of colour in her cheeks,” while yet another maintains “her complexion [to be] one of her chief charms” (7-8). Such debate about Gwendolen’s appearance (and character) continues throughout the novel, suggesting just how mercurial—how dynamic—she is.

181 over her “domestic empire” (32). Less lofty are the roles of dutiful niece, loving daughter, and charming cousin, which she adopts with equal ease when desired. However, while many of

Gwendolen’s roles are consciously adopted, the variable emotions and moods that accompany them are not and, throughout Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen veers from supercilious to anxious, eager to bored, fearless to fearful, self-confident to insecure at a moment’s notice. Her emotional volatility ultimately leaves her as “uncertain about [her]self” as others are about her (114)—an uncertainty no one, especially the men themselves, appears to feel about Grandcourt, Gascoigne, or Mallinger.

Despite distinguishing her from these less than exemplary men, Gwendolen’s habit of performance and her emotional volatility have been severely censured by characters and critics alike. This disapproval arises in part because, as Audrey Jaffe argues, these traits “express a desire and capacity for transformation” that implicitly challenges “the idea of essential identity per se”—of a rooted, stable, and fixed self (Sympathy 150, emphasis added).192 We see this challenge early in the narrative when Gwendolen explicitly disputes the desirability of a well- rooted life in one of her many offhanded comments, this one made to Grandcourt about the limits of being a woman in nineteenth-century England:

We women can’t go in search of adventures—to find out the North-West Passage or the

source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where

the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as

192 Explaining the threat Gwendolen poses to Deronda, Jaffe suggests that Gwendolen’s “capacity for transformation” displays “the malleability Deronda [initially] embodies yet wishes to reject. The self knowledge that supposedly crowns his narrative and solidifies his identity—the knowledge contained in, and produced by, the affirmation “I am a Jew”—thus effectively saves him from another kind of self-knowledge: the kind that threatens the notion that he has any essential identity to discover at all” (Sympathy 150). Thus, Gwendolen’s malleability, her dynamism, challenges the nineteenth-century realist’s novel’s central narrative of identity formation—a point I will return to in the concluding section of this chapter.

182

we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my notion about the plants: they are

often bored, and that is the reason why some of them have got so poisonous. (DD 113)193

While specifically focused on the restrictions imposed on women by society, this passage suggests both the dullness and danger (the dangerous dullness, perhaps) of any life that is too settled, too rooted, and thereby challenges the logic of such roots—after all, it is not only flowers but all “plants” that run the risk of becoming poisonous should they remain too long in any fixed position.

Although she is alert to and resentful of her society’s desire to “plant” its women—to limit and fix their identity—and purports to embrace “uncertainty” and the potential it contains

(124), Gwendolen is also terrified of the “immeasurable existence aloof from her,” the world outside of and apart from herself for, “in the midst” of such vastness, she realizes “she [is] helplessly incapable of asserting herself” (52). To counter this sense of helplessness—which is also a fear of meaninglessness, of nothingness, of not being—Gwendolen asserts herself (asserts her “peremptory” will [12]) with such force, such “arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness” as it were, that, despite her potentially transformative uncertainty, mobility, and malleability, she renders herself as “narrow” and “fenced in”—as parochial and rooted—as her future husband, her uncle, and her future uncle-in-law are shown to be.194 Her terror of the unknown (both the unknown within and the unknown without195) prompts her to seek her reflection—a confirmation

193 The use of botanical metaphors in Gwendolen’s complaint pointedly alludes to—and challenges—John Ruskin’s famous essay on the proper place of women, “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865).

194 Comparing Gwendolen’s imperiousness to Grandcourt’s, Linehan shows how both are “characterized” via “the language of political domination”; however, Linehan notes, “once Grandcourt is introduced into the book, a striking inversion takes place” and this language “quickly gravitates to him instead [of her] and remains centred around him throughout the remainder of the novel” (330). This “inversion” is part of Gwendolen’s dislodgment—or deracination—a process discussed in the section 4, below.

195 In addition to her terror of the “immeasurable existence aloof from her,” Gwendolen is frequently said to be “afraid of herself” (DD 116), of the “unmapped country within” her own soul that she doesn’t understand or feel she can control (235). Such fear reaches its climax when she confesses to Daniel that, when Grandcourt fell overboard, she “saw [her] wish outside [herself],” that she, in fact, “kill[ed] him in [her] thoughts” (596). 183 of her fortunate self—in every surface she sees, until that self becomes the only thing she can see. Ultimately, in her fear, Gwendolen arrests the very capacity for transformation her dynamic character possesses.

Gwendolen’s stagnation of being is perceived by the dynamic, brilliant, foreign musician,

Herr Klesmer, and it is, rather significantly, her self-assured singing that prompts his complaint about the narrowness of English music and culture: “You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair organ,” he begins after her performance at the Arrowpoints’s home,

But you produce your notes badly; and that music which you sing is beneath you. It is a

form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture—a dawdling, canting, see-saw

kind of stuff—the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There is

a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody; no cries of deep,

mysterious passion—no conflict—no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they

listen to it. (39, emphasis added)

By turning away from the “immeasurable existence aloof from her”—from the uncertain world outside and beyond herself and her control—and looking instead only to/for herself, Gwendolen shrinks in being, much as those who listen to her singing become “small” because of the insularity, ignorance, and even the self-satisfied ease and simplicity of it: there is nowhere to go—nowhere to grow—in either her music or her life as both are fixed within their limited, provincial scores. Thus, even as Gwendolen dreams of escaping the life expected of her, of doing something more, something different, something “exceptional,” she finds herself unable to see or even think beyond the narrow horizon of “genteel romance” within which she was brought up and within which she sees herself: “what she was not clear upon was, how she should set about leading any other [life], and what were the particular acts which she would assert her freedom by doing,” the narrator explains (43). Accordingly, when faced with her family’s loss of fortune, 184

Gwendolen’s options are extremely limited and remarkably cliché: she may become a governess, an actress, or a wife. It is as if her life choices have been pulled from the pages of a Victorian novel—one of those “pictures of life” we are told she so eagerly consumes (130)—and neither she nor any of her friends or family members can see or imagine a possibility beyond them.196

Yet even as he criticizes her puerile performance and, by extension, her parochial and narrowly—narratively—inscribed life, Klesmer sees that such limits are “beneath” Gwendolen and that she has the potential to achieve the “breadth of horizon” she presently lacks. The fact that she is open enough to respond to his criticism with “a sinking of heart” and an awareness of

“the sudden width of horizon [that had] opened round her small musical performance” (39)— indeed, that she “has the fullness of nature” to respond to Klesmer’s own musical performance with “an excitement which lifted her for the moment into a desperate indifference about her own doings” (40)—confirms this potential, if only for the moment. And it is precisely this potential for growth, however fleeting, however slight, that separates her from her future husband, a man who neither wants nor feels any need for change and thus denies all possibility of growth.197 In order to change—to achieve this breadth of horizon, this widening of knowledge and being— however, Gwendolen must open herself to that “deep, mysterious passion,” that “conflict” that comes with a “sense of the universal”; in other words, she must relinquish her desire for

“mastery of life” (31), and open herself to the discomfort, terror, and uncertainty of the unknown and uncontrollable that exists both inside herself in that “unmapped country within” (235) and

196 Significantly, the narrator explicitly notes limits of the Victorian realist novel after Gwendolen is confronted by Lydia Glasher, Grandcourt’s mistress and the mother of his children: despite “consisting chiefly in what are called pictures of life,” in, that is realism, “Gwendolen’s uncontrolled reading…had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality” (130).

197 In perhaps the most explicit expression of his stagnant, inflexible, and, consequently, utterly puerile character, Grandcourt petulantly announces, “I don’t want any change” after learning he must pause his yachting trip due to a squall, which has damaged his boat (DD 578). This assertion of his “will” in the face of the universe, as it were, although entirely futile, suggests how at odds Grandcourt is with the universe.

185 outside herself in the “immeasurable existence” beyond. She must, in other words, allow herself to be at sea.

IV. “So As By Fire”: The Discomforts of Deracination

Responding to Blackwood’s early praise of and concern for Gwendolen—for he, like so many readers after him, found “that wicked witch…perfectly irresistible” (Eliot Letters 6: 182)—

Eliot wrote, “It will perhaps be a little comfort to you to know that poor Gwen is spiritually saved, but “so as by fire.” Don't you see the process already beginning? I have no doubt you do, for you are a wide-awake reader” (188). Although she promises to save her “irresistible” heroine,

Eliot’s reference here to 1 Corinthians suggests not only how painful and consuming

Gwendolen’s ordeal to overcome the limits of her self will be but also how much she will first have to lose in order to be “saved.”198 Consequently, whether she is saved or not is itself a matter of much debate, and many critics both past and present have felt that Gwendolen is, in Henry

James’s familiar formulation, “punished for being narrow and is not allowed a chance to expand”

(“A Conversation” 431). While she certainly suffers for being narrow and selfish and vain— indeed, Christina Crosby has gone so far as to claim that Gwendolen’s entire story “only sounds that one note” of pitiless punishment (26)—her final acts of relinquishing her claim to Daniel and asserting her will to live a “better” life (DD 694-5), anguished and uncertain as they are, are, I believe, gestures of her emerging awareness and embracing of her potential for an ethical, meaningful, larger existence that resides within and outside her and her nation. She is not, as

Crosby maintains, “doomed to a distinctly untranscendent life” (26), nor is she, as Sarah Gates contends, left with “no script but that of tragic scapegoat, since the domestic closure of

198 The verse in the King James Bible reads, “If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire” (1 Cor. 3:15).

186 wifehood…has here been figuratively handed to the hero” (720), nor, finally, is she permanently

“excluded” from the “historic action and…historical consciousness” that form the nation, as

Helsinger claims (232); rather, the novel ends as it begins, in medias res, with the rest of

Gwendolen’s story—the rest of her life—yet to be written—yet to be lived—and with her newly awakened to the potential-filled morning light and the possibility of a new narrative that is as of yet unscripted, unknown.199

But, before we can contemplate what many consider a rather suspect, even non-existent, salvation, we must examine the nature of the flames Eliot lights to save her heroine, for

Gwendolen isn’t the only one burned—and potentially saved—by them: Eliot’s readers are as well. When Gwendolen gazes into her mirror for confirmation of her “fortunate self”—her confident, comfortable sense of her preeminence—one recognizes the similarity of her behaviour to that of Eliot’s readers, who gazed into the “looking-glass” of the realist novel with the expectation that they too will receive confirmation of their fortunate, superior selves (Francillon

384). However, as R. E. Francillon announces in his laudatory review of Daniel Deronda published October 1876 in Gentleman’s Magazine, “By risking the immediate disappointment of a large number of her most ardent admirers, George Eliot has paid us a higher compliment than if she had given us another Silas Marner. She has practically refused to believe the common libel, upon us who read fiction, that we only care to look at our own photographs and to be told what we already know” (385). Of course, glancing back at the reception of Daniel Deronda, it is clear that the majority of Eliot’s readers did “only care to look at [their] own photographs and be told what [they] already [knew],” and that Eliot, taking seriously her position as England’s moral

199 Both Garrett Stewart and Hilary Schor have argued that Daniel Deronda’s ends in medias res although, as Stewart points out, this fact “is perhaps easy to overlook because the “things” (res) it leaves hanging are mostly the reader’s to comprehend and bring forth” (Dear Reader 302). While Stewart focuses on the middle the readers are left in—on the “things” they have to do—Schor focuses on the middle Gwendolen is left in, a middle she maintains, that is, by fact of being a middle, full of “potential” (“Make-Believe” 72). I will return to these ideas when I discuss what it means to be “saved” in/by Daniel Deronda in the final section, below.

187 guide, more than “risked the immediate disappointment” of her readers, she sought it out as a means of breaking the solipsistic cycle of stagnant, self-gratifying “exchange” between realist text and Victorian reader. Thus, even as she exposes and condemns the narrowness, arrogance, egotism, and self-satisfied complacency of her countrymen in her depictions of Grandcourt,

Mallinger, Gascoigne, and Gwendolen, Eliot offers her readers the chance to overcome themselves and become “better”—larger—alongside Gwendolen in/through Daniel Deronda by denying them the comfort and certainty typically provided by nineteenth-century realist fiction.

She does so, most pointedly, through the introduction of the “foreign” Jewish plot into her

“familiar” English novel. Not only does this plot disrupt the “story of English life”—the story of their life—that so many of Eliot’s readers believed they were reading, but in doing so it disrupts their certainty about the realist novel and the comfortable, familiar, yet limited Anglo-centric reality it offers, offering, in its place, the possibility of other—new, unfamiliar, uncertain, and therefore unlimited—realities and narratives.

In order to overcome themselves, in order to become “better,” Eliot realized that her readers, like her heroine, would first have to undergo a process of deracination, one that unsettled, discomforted, disconcerted, and dislodged them from the comfort and certainty of their too well-rooted identity—after all, as Gwendolen’s painfully drawn-out, “one note” story of dislodgment suggests, it is “the process itself” that matters (Sudrann 441, emphasis added).200

Certainly, as my earlier analysis of the novel’s opening paragraph suggests, one can “see” (or rather, feel) this “process already beginning” from the very beginning as our early expectations for a novel by George Eliot are ignored—flouted even—and we are left in a perplexing position of uncertainty and insecurity. That such an uncomfortable position is also the one Gwendolen

200 Detailing the stages of Gwendolen’s deracination, Jean Sudrann reminds us that “[t]he sheer amount of space George Eliot devotes to the description of the destruction of [Gwendolen’s self-] image is sufficient measure of the importance she attaches to the process itself” (441). 188 finds herself in when she becomes aware of Deronda’s “arrested” gaze—of his “looking down on her as an inferior…as a specimen of a lower order” while she plays roulette in Leubronn— suggests our imaginative alignment with her: that it is she, rather than Deronda or any of the other male characters discussed above, with whom we are meant to primarily identify (DD 5-6).

Of course, in assuming Deronda is thinking of her (even in this censorious manner),

Gwendolen’s response is, as Jaffe points out, “a measure of what is conventionally called [her] narcissism,…[and] what she responds to is her own projection: her image reflected in his eyes”

(Sympathy 146). At the same time, however, Gwendolen’s projection also functions as a measure of her inherent insecurity and self-doubt: the self she sees is not the superior self she wants to see

(and is used to seeing) but a self displaced—a self shown to be inferior to another. Thus, as much as her response points to her narcissism, it also points to her responsiveness to the world around her—her potential for change in response to others. That this particular other is not immediately identifiable as an Englishman (“Is he an Englishman?” Gwendolen asks after learning Deronda’s name [DD 9]), is also significant as it hints that it is his foreignness—his difference from her— that has sparked this potential. In this moment, however, she does not live up to her capacity for change, responding to Deronda’s disconcerting gaze with a feigned indifference and a perverse return to her previous state: “She controlled herself by the help of an inward defiance, and without other sign of emotion than this lip-paleness turned to her play” (6). In many ways the discomfort, uncertainty, frustration, and even the “inward defiance” Gwendolen feels in this moment mirrors the reader’s own feelings in response to the novel’s disconcerting opening, and

Gwendolen continues to gamble much as the reader continues to read: in order to assert her control over—her mastery of and certainty about—the situation/Deronda/herself (or, in the reader’s case, of the text/Deronda/herself) and regain her superior and decidedly more comfortable subject position. 189

That both Gwendolen and the reader do manage to reassert their well-rooted, egocentric subject positions—at least for a moment—is suggested by Gwendolen’s mirror-exchange discussed above as well as by the narrative’s return to England, which, as previously mentioned, returns the reader (alongside Gwendolen) to the seemingly familiar and predictable world of provincial England and the realist novel. In fact, having already advertised the novel as one “of

English life,” “like ‘Middlemarch’” (Lewes, Eliot Letters 6: 193),201 Eliot structures her narrative in such a way as to initially encourage readers to settle into the English plot after the unsettling, foreign opening, simultaneously giving them the time and the grounds (both geographic and literary) to do so. To explain: after Gwendolen leaves Germany to return to England, the narrative leaps back to the previous year when Gwendolen and her family first arrived at

Offendene and, for the next thirteen chapters, immerses us in what appears to be a familiar and straightforward provincial marriage plot à la Jane Austen, complete with witty banter, gossiping neighbours, and a young woman very much in need of an education. Not only does the attentive reader perceive traces of Mansfield Park (1814) in the initial storyline of poor relations, cousinly romance, amateur theatrics, arrogant uncles, and the ignored (but present) imperial underpinnings of England’s country estates and domestic relations; but, when the “rumour” that a “bachelor of good fortune and possibilities [is] coming within reach” sweeps the neighbourhood and prompts “speculations” of “matrimonial prospects” in all the local families with marriageable daughters (DD 75-6)—including those in “that border territory of rank” such

201 Responding to a letter from Blackwood asking if they should “let loose any gossiping paragraphs,” since “the name Daniel Deronda does not give the idea of such a thorough picture of English life” (Eliot Letters 6: 186-7), Lewes, who always acted as Eliot’s agent in publication matters, responded with the suggestion that they advertise with the following: ““George Eliot’s New Story of English Life—DANIEL DERONDA—will appear in Eight Monthly Parts. The first part to be published on February 1.” That is the kind of announcement I should suggest…I don’t know how the gossip paragraph should read. It may as well say that the new book like ‘Middlemarch,’ is a story of English life but of our own day, and dealing for the most part in a higher sphere of Society” (192-3). Although Lewes was well aware of Eliot’s plans for the novel vis-à-vis the Jewish plot, both the announcement and the gossiping paragraph deliberately emphasize the English character of the story and, while possibly merely a marketing ploy, since such was the “most popular scent” in literature (187), such advertising would encourage readers to accept the novel as such.

190 as Gwendolen’s (17)—we are also pointedly reminded of the rumours and speculations that famously open Austen’s most well-known, well-loved novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813).202

Indeed, given Gwendolen’s precarious social and economic situation, her excess of sisters, her indulgent, ineffective mother, and her lively, somewhat biting wit and willful, proud personality—details offered on top of these marital rumours—one cannot help but be reminded of Austen’s most-beloved heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, and, being so reminded, cannot help but forecast a similar narrative trajectory for Gwendolen, whose moral education and happy ending now appear guaranteed. Thus, while Daniel Deronda initially differs from Eliot’s previous novels with its peculiar opening, its early books deliberately allude to a comfortably familiar

(and recognizably English) literary tradition, effectively creating a horizon of expectation for readers which draws on their horizon of experience. In doing so, Eliot implicitly encourages her readers to settle into a text that promises to tell a story they already know. That this story also happens to be “of [their] own day” (Lewes, Eliot Letters 6: 193)—about “life that is…clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as [their] own”—only serves to make it that much more familiar and, therefore, to make readers that much more comfortable with and certain about the story and their relation to it. By the close of book one then, we occupy as confident, complacent, narcissistic, and narrow a position in regard to the novel as Gwendolen does in regard to her world.

202 Arguably Eliot revisits Pride and Prejudice’s famous opening—“It is a truth universally acknowledged…” (1)— when she acknowledges that Some readers of this history will doubtless regard it as incredible that people should construct matrimonial prospects on the mere report that a bachelor of good fortune and possibilities was coming within reach, and will reject the statement as mere outflow of gall: they will aver that neither they nor their first cousins have minds so unbridled; and that in fact this is not human nature, which would know that such speculations might turn out to be fallacious, and would therefore not entertain them. (DD 76) While such reactions may not be “universally acknowledged” or indulged in as Austen’s opening sardonically suggests, Eliot’s novel is no more interested in universals than Austen’s are (except, perhaps, to invalidate them); rather, as Eliot’s narrator makes clear, “nothing is here narrated of human nature generally: the history in its present stage concerns only a few people in a corner of Wessex,” specifically those who are “all on visiting terms with persons of rank”: those whose world is as socially narrow as that of any Austen novel (76).

191

Admittedly, throughout book one Gwendolen does suffer a series of brief displacements—disconcerting moments when her “fortunate self” is decentered or destabilized— as when she discovers that Deronda has redeemed and returned to her the turquoise necklace she pawned to pay her passage home (14-5), when she hears Klesmer’s music (39-40), and the two times she is surprised by the picture of the dead face hidden in the piano (20, 49). However, after each of these moments (among others), Gwendolen is able to reassert her fortunate self—her self-confidence and her sense of superiority—through a mirror-like exchange with the world wherein she sees only the self she has been raised to see. Readers likewise suffer some momentary discomforts in this book as they make their way through Eliot’s demanding, virtuosic prose, which shifts back and forth from the particular to the general, the interior to the exterior, the abstract to the concrete, the metaphoric to the actual, the present to the past and the future without pause or warning. But, like Gwendolen, we continually resettle ourselves by holding on to the narrative strands we recognize and desire: the familiar character types (the spoiled, headstrong young woman, the enamored, charming young man, the mysterious, wealthy gentleman, and the supporting cast of parents, siblings, and neighbours), the amusing social banter, the dramatic set pieces (the Arrowpoints’s party, Gwendolen’s tableau, Rex’s hunting accident, the archery contest), as well as the ever-enticing promise of romance that the opening scene and the rumours of an eligible bachelor so deliberately introduced. Indeed, despite the challenges of the prose, this is a novel world with which we are thoroughly familiar.

To be sure, readers’ certainty of and comfort in the narrative is furthered by the novel(ist)’s implicit promise that Gwendolen’s Austenian story—that is, the story of her moral education and happily rooted ending in/through marriage—will intimately involve the titular hero whose gaze causes such discomfort in the opening pages of the novel. As Hilary Schor points out, by opening the novel with the incomplete encounter between Deronda and 192

Gwendolen in Leubronn, “our expectations have clearly been aroused. The beginning of the middle, the moment when Gwendolen and Daniel come together and do not (yet) meet, promises us that their fates will be (permanently, which is to say closurally) bound together”—that they will, in other words, eventually marry (“Make-Believe” 68). From the very beginning of Daniel

Deronda then, we are made to feel that we know how the novel will end, knowledge which gives us a stable, confident position from which to read. So certain does this fate appear, in fact—so confident were readers in it—that, in their review of the first book, the Glasgow News went so far as to print their “[shrewd suspicion]” that “a certain Mr Mallinger Grandcourt”—the

“bachelor of good fortune” to whom Gwendolen (alongside the reader) eagerly awaits an introduction at the close of the book—“will turn out to be identical with Daniel Deronda” (qtd. in

Martin, Serial 219). That such a suspicion blatantly ignores the facts of the text—facts that tell us

Gwendolen cannot meet Deronda prior to her time in Leubronn (when she sees him in the casino, she has never seen him before)—suggests how little outside realities matter to the confident, expectant, desiring reader. The certainty that their expectations will be met—their confidence that their perspective will be confirmed, their desires fulfilled—allows readers to ignore those facts—indeed, those realities—which do not fit or synchronize with their expectations and desires.

So certain are we, in fact, that even though the Glasgow News’s misguided expectations are disappointed as soon as the second book begins and we are introduced to Grandcourt,203 our confidence that the fates of Gwendolen and Deronda are “closurally”—that is, romantically—

203 Notably, while Gwendolen does not share the Glasgow News’ suspicions about Grandcourt (indeed, cannot since she has not yet seen Deronda in Leubronn at this point in her story), she has formed many of her own expectations about the heir, which are equally disappointed (in her case, perhaps, relieved): Grandcourt, we are told, “could hardly have been more unlike her imaginary portraits of him” (DD 90). Her “shock” at this “reversal of her expectations”—“which flushed her cheeks”—suggests both how readily we become bound by (and confident of) our expectations and how discomfiting it is to have them proved wrong (90). The Glasgow News’ subsequent review suggests much the same as it attempts to excuse its faux pas by claiming that because book one had given readers the “merest glimpse of the hero,…our curiosity was therefore baffled to a great extent”” (qtd. in Martin, Serial 219).

193 bound remains unshaken. Even after Gwendolen “gets her choice”204 and marries Grandcourt in book four, the reader continues to anticipate a romance between her and Deronda, not only because of the intensity of their encounters (which remain as arresting as their first encounter in

Leubronn—to them as well as to us) and the increasing suspicions of those around them (many of whom hint at what appears to be an improper relationship between the two),205 but also because of their apparent roles as co-protagonists (Gwendolen having been the primary focus of the novel thus far, Deronda being the name on its cover) whose independent plotlines—which the novel’s opening has implicitly promised are not so independent—must converge for the novel to be aesthetically and structurally whole.206 If the Victorian multi-plot novel (particularly

Eliot’s) teaches its readers anything, after all, it is that all plots eventually converge and that a coincidence is never really a coincidence, making it highly unlikely that Grandcourt just happens to be Sir Hugo’s nephew and Deronda his ward, that Gwendolen’s family just happens to be struck by financial ruin, that Deronda just happens to be in Leubronn when Gwendolen is there, that their eyes just happen to meet across the crowded room if their plotlines—their lives—were not meant to be connected in some essential, lasting, and romantic way. Therefore, when

Grandcourt conveniently drowns in book seven while he and Gwendolen just happen to be passing through the same Mediterranean city where Deronda is meeting his mother (where all, of course, just happen to be staying at the same hotel), it finally seems like our expectations will be

204 “Gwendolen Gets Her Choice” is the title of book four and it is in this book that she marries Grandcourt. Provocatively—promisingly—this book also happens to be the one in which she and Deronda finally meet, introduced in an offhanded manner by Grandcourt himself (DD 278).

205 According to Carol Martin’s assessment of the reviews published after book five appeared, “[r]eaders seem to have anticipated the conventional seduction or elopement” between the two (Serial 227), much as Sir Hugo does when, perceiving the increasing intimacy between Gwendolen and Deronda, he warns the latter against “playing with fire” (DD 389).

206 As the Edinburgh Courant explains after book two appeared, although Deronda and Gwendolen have at this point only had their single passing encounter in Leubronn, readers nevertheless “know by all good rules of art that he is certain to exercise a powerful influence…on the willful heroine” (qtd. in Martin, Serial 221). 194 met and Gwendolen, like Dorothea and countless other heroines before her, will get to exchange her unhappy marriage for a happy one.207

The fact that “we are not alone in our imaginings” further bolsters our confidence in them: Schor notes how numerous characters, including Sir Hugo, Rex Gascoigne, and Hans

Meyrick, who are “trained like us to read coincidence as destiny, follow Gwendolen and

Deronda’s “remarkable” path to an unremarkable ending, hoping to find the lead characters successfully tucked into the marriage bed” (“Make-Believe” 68). “[E]ven Lady Mallinger, no ingenious plotter, confesses “it had passed through her mind that after a proper time Daniel might marry Mrs Grandcourt—because it seemed so remarkable that he should be at Genoa just at that time”” (68, emphasis added). To readers and characters alike, “trained” as they are to read coincidence as fate, life as narrative, it would seem, in the words of Sir Hugo, “as pretty a story as need be” that Gwendolen and Daniel “should have turned out to be formed for each other, and that the unsuitable husband should have made his exit in such excellent time” (DD 654)—after all, it is the story we’ve anticipated since the two laid eyes on each other (and we on them) on the very first page of the novel.

As aesthetically and sentimentally appealing as this conclusion may seem, however, it is not the conclusion Eliot gives us. Instead, in a truly remarkable—that is, unconventional in the nineteenth-century realist novel—turn of events, Deronda discovers he is a Jew, marries the

“beautiful Jewess,” Mirah (306), and undertakes a journey to the East in the hopes of establishing a Jewish homeland, all of which leaves Gwendolen and her peers “totter[ing]” in his wake

207 Our expectations that Gwendolen will end up like Dorothea are deliberately heightened by certain similarities of their relationships: not only are both caught in loveless marriages and have romantic inclinations elsewhere, but both have husbands who set out to humiliate them in their wills; moreover, that Lush informs Gwendolen (and the reader) of the insulting stipulations of Grandcourt’s will shortly before the two set out on their European voyage, ensures that we are alert to the parallels between Dorothea and Gwendolen precisely when our expectations for Gwendolen and Deronda to finally come together are the highest.

195

(691).208 That Eliot’s readers were also left “tottering” in the wake of this conclusion is suggested in the number of frustrated and bewildered reviews that appeared after the final installment including the Saturday Review’s, which, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, complains of being left “at sea” at the close of Daniel Deronda, and the North American

Review’s, which remarks upon “the almost universal disappointment at the unanticipated conclusion of the story—a conclusion which many readers have resented as though it were a personal grievance or affront” (qtd. in Gettelman, “Reading Ahead” 29).209 Accounting for the intensity and prevalence of such reactions in “Reading Ahead in George Eliot,” Debra Gettelman remarks that Eliot’s readers typically “wished to have their surmises confirmed, not surprised”

(29), a statement that dovetails with my own claim regarding the Victorian reader’s desire for confirmation rather than confrontation, certainty rather than uncertainty, and the familiar rather than the foreign or unknown. Thus, by initially encouraging her readers to settle into one familiar framework, one known narrative, and then refusing to meet the expectations such a framework established, Eliot pointedly denies her readers the comfort and confirmation they long for and expect. In doing so, Eliot not only disappoints and disconcerts readers who feel misled and betrayed by their moral guide, but also exposes their own “intellectual narrowness,” which, like the narrowness of Gwendolen, Grandcourt, and their uncles, has rendered them both unwilling and unable to see beyond their own deeply-rooted prejudices, desires, expectations, and selves— those narrow horizons of that which is familiar, comfortable, and known within which they are

208 Within the novel “[t]he person most surprised by the ending of Daniel Deronda is,” Schor notes, “Gwendolen herself” (“Make-Believe” 69), since she, more than anyone, had been certain of and invested in her and Deronda’s romantically-joined fates (“It was not her thought, that he loved her and would cling to her…it was her spiritual breath” [DD 659]); however, the number of critics who exclaimed their surprise—and anger—with the ending suggest they were just as certain of and invested in this conclusion as Gwendolen herself, creating yet another parallel between English readers and Gwendolen.

209 While the majority of reviewers note a similar “disappointment” at the novel’s conclusion, there are some notable defenses of it, although these primarily came from Jewish readers. For examples of these, see Martin’s “Contemporary Critics and Judaism in Daniel Deronda.”

196 so deeply rooted. After all, the surprise and frustration Eliot’s readers feel at the “unanticipated conclusion” of the novel are necessarily predicated on their eagerness to ignore—or, more troublingly, to actively dismiss—the strange and unfamiliar Jewish plotline in favour of the comfortable and familiar English one.210

Like the Glasgow News’s dismissal of facts that destabilized—even contradicted—their expectations for Grandcourt/Deronda at the end of book one, any reader surprised and disappointed by the conclusion to Daniel Deronda is a reader who ignored or dismissed all the facts—all the realities—that challenged their expectations (and desires) for the novel. Indeed, had readers given the Jewish plot the attention they gave to the English plot, had they accepted it as equally important, equally worthy of their attention and care, its characters equally viable as protagonists, its story equally worth telling—had they truly been the “wide awake,” open-minded readers Eliot wished them to be—the novel’s conclusion could never have been called

“unanticipated.” For not only is Deronda emotionally invested in Mirah before he ever sets eyes on Gwendolen, having saved the “lovely Jewess” from suicide and pledged himself to finding her family long before he goes to Leubronn (DD 165), but, as the narrative unfolds, he becomes more and more frustrated with and burdened by Gwendolen, with whom he finds himself increasingly unable to sympathize.211 Moreover, although Gwendolen continues to think of

Deronda when he is not around, reflecting on his advice and worrying about what she imagines to be his dispossession by Grandcourt and herself, his own thoughts are increasingly taken up

210 Significantly, English readers were not the only ones guilty of such one-sided reading, and Gertrude Himmelfarb has shown that many Jewish readers were just as inclined to dismiss the English plotline as English readers were the Jewish one. For details see footnote 149.

211 Noting that, “when confronted with Gwendolen’s urgent need, Deronda most frequently notices, and Eliot most frequently calls attention to, the absence or insufficiency of sympathetic feeling in him” (Sympathy 147), Jaffe argues that this inability to respond to Gwendolen increases as Deronda discovers and consents to his Jewish identity thereby revealing sympathy to be “an identification with and affirmation of similarity” rather than “a means toward understanding difference” (141). Deronda’s failure to sympathize with Gwendolen—his inability to do so— suggestively points to the limits (the impossibility?) of imaginative sympathy, and in The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans Rosemarie Bodenheimer has famously argued that Eliot deconstructs sympathy in Daniel Deronda.

197 with Mirah, Mordecai, and himself as he learns more about their pasts, their faith, and their culture, and discovers the truth about himself and his familial and cultural inheritance. Indeed, as the narrator unequivocally (and forebodingly) tells us: “She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was thinking of her” (467).

Such narrative cues regarding Gwendolen and Deronda’s separate fates are matched by structural cues that likewise point readers towards what is, I argue, the novel’s decidedly anticipated conclusion. Specifically, as Carol Martin demonstrates in her detailed analysis of

Daniel Deronda’s serial publication, the structuring of the chapters increasingly highlights the divergence of Gwendolen and Deronda’s stories rather than their longed-for convergence as we continue to alternate between their plotlines rather than see them come together. Even when they do finally come together after Grandcourt’s death at the end of book seven and again briefly after their return to England in book eight, so many chapters have come between them and so much has happened in each of their lives (particularly Deronda’s, which has been filled with his emotional meeting with his mother, his discovery of his Jewish heritage, his acknowledgement of his love for Mirah, and his acceptance of Mordecai’s Zionist vision), that these meetings function to highlight the radical separateness of their lives, the fundamental discreteness of their narratives, rather than the longed-for unification of them.

In addition to emphasizing the divergence of Gwendolen and Deronda’s stories, the novel’s structure creates a clear shift in balance between the English and the Jewish plots, with the latter becoming progressively predominant in the last four installments (books four through eight) as Deronda’s discoveries take him deeper into Jewish culture, faith, politics, and geographies and, therefore, further away from Gwendolen and the provincial, Anglo-centric world she inhabits and represents. Starting in book four, increasing amounts of narrative space are given over to Deronda’s Jewish excursions and encounters (most of which are focused on his 198 meetings with Mordecai), while less and less space is given to Gwendolen’s domestic drama and private suffering.212 Despite all these narrative and structural cues—cues which pointedly suggest a very different outcome, or rather, make for a very different novel than the one Eliot’s readers believed themselves to be reading—the majority of English readers resisted acknowledging the Jewish plot’s claim to equal narrative significance and consideration as that of the English plot, often resenting and ignoring what they saw as its unnecessary interruptions to their/Gwendolen’s “story of English life.”

The unwillingness of Eliot’s English readers to follow Deronda into the Jewish plot— their resistance and resentment of its narrative claims on them—is made abundantly clear in the reviews that appeared during and immediately after the novel’s serialization, many of which, after registering their surprise at “the amount of attention given to this new subject” in book four and beyond (Martin, Serial 223), became increasingly intolerant of everything and anyone connected to it. For instance, Mirah, who was initially admired for both her gentle grace and the dramatic interest her character introduces to the novel via her exoticism, her tragic history, and her potentially romantic (yet certainly doomed) relationship with Deronda, begins to “[irritate readers] against her” with her excessive “meekness and patience”—qualities that are, notably, most associated with her practice of her faith and most directly opposed to those qualities

212 Arguably this shift in emphasis is marked by Eliot’s decision to have the narrative turn away from Gwendolen in the middle of book four while she is screaming in a “fit of madness” with Grandcourt’s jewels “scattered around her on the floor” and his mistress’s letter burning in the fire (303)—a dramatic, suspenseful, and powerful scene—in order to follow Deronda on his “rambl[es] in those parts of London which are most inhabited by common Jews” as he haphazardly undertakes his search for Mirah’s family (321). This search, which prompts Deronda to address many of his own prejudices and feelings regarding Jews and Judaism, is detailed over three lengthy chapters, the last of which (containing Deronda’s intimate and sympathy-inducing visit to the Cohen family) closes the book (and the second volume), a structural decision that implicitly shifts the emphasis of the individual installment and the novel as a whole from the English plot to the Jewish plot. When we return to Gwendolen at the beginning of the next installment (book five, volume three), it is not to conclude the scene where we left her, but rather to meet her as Mrs. Grandcourt alongside Deronda, who is visiting his uncle (who is also hosting the Grandcourts) for the Christmas holidays; when he returns to London later in the book, we stay with him, leaving Gwendolen once again. Although there will be moments in later installments when we follow Gwendolen apart from Deronda, these moments become fewer and fewer. Indeed, the jewel scene in book four marks the last time Gwendolen’s story/the English plot is given narrative precedence over Deronda’s story/the Jewish plot.

199 associated with Gwendolen (Hutton, “Deronda” 368). At the same time Mordecai, who was never a favourite, becomes “caviare to the multitude, an unintelligible idea…[that] readers would not care to unravel” (Saturday Review, “Deronda” 379). Baffled as to “what reason the author can have had for thrusting him on their [the readers’] unwilling attention,” and unwilling to devote any time or energy to figuring it out, the Saturday Review instead dismisses the entire

Jewish portion of the novel and suggests that most readers have done so as well: “The ordinary reader…ignores these mystic persons, and in family circles Gwendolen has been as much the heroine…as if there were no Mirah” (379). Henry James, although no “ordinary reader,” likewise admits to becoming frustrated with the Jewish plot: “Little by little I began to feel that I cared less for certain notes than for others. I say it under my breath—I began to feel an occasional temptation to skip. Roughly speaking, all the Jewish burden of the story tended to weary me”

(“A Conversation” 422). Most pointed, perhaps, is the Guardian’s unwillingness to even acknowledge this plot in their review of the novel: “when we have discussed Gwendolen, we have discussed the book” (qtd. in Martin, Serial 231).

Such resistance to the significance (indeed, the very existence) of the Jewish plot both in and of itself and in relation to the English plot, is, however, precisely what ensures Eliot’s most intolerant, most solipsistic, most provincial readers will experience as momentous a feeling of dislocation—of bewilderment, uncertainty, and even humiliation—in response to the novel’s remarkable conclusion as Gwendolen herself feels when Deronda finally tells her, in the novel’s penultimate chapter, of his race and his intention of going East—of, that is, his essential otherness and the absolute “separateness of his life” from her own (682). This final, climactic meeting between Deronda and Gwendolen takes place in England, a few months after

Grandcourt’s death and Deronda’s discovery of his Jewish heritage, and it achieves what no 200 previous shock or disappointment has managed: it “dislodge[s]” Gwendolen “from her supremacy in her own world” (689). Writes Eliot:

There was a long silence between them. The world seemed getting larger round

poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst. The thought that he

might come back after going to the East, sank before the bewildering vision of these

wide-stretching purposes in which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes

a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger

destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading,

enter like an earthquake into their own lives—when the urgency of growing generations

turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers

know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all

vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their

betrothed husbands…

That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen’s

small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement,

for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a

sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence of which her own was

revolving. (688-9, emphasis added)

While the violence and force with which Gwendolen is “dislodged,” deracinated “from her supremacy” in this moment is registered in the violent images of the wider world that opens itself

“like an earthquake” before her—“the tread of an invading army,” “the dire clash of civil war,”

“the corpses,” and “the shattered limbs”—what is also registered here is her newfound awareness of this wider world. Although Gwendolen has, over the course of her unhappy marriage, been shaken and disturbed enough to want to change (“I mean to be very wise; I do 201 really. And good—oh so good to you, dear, old, sweet mamma, you won’t know me” [650]) and, indeed, had changed (transforming from the “brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the

Archery Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled to confess her unworthiness” [603]), it isn’t until she is confronted with—surprised by—Deronda’s otherness, his “wide-stretching purposes,” and the absolute “separateness of his life” from her own—from, indeed, all she knows and all she can imagine—that she is made aware of another world outside her own, a world filled with “wide-stretching purposes,” “great movements,” and “larger destinies”—a world, that is, filled with other narrative possibilities hitherto unknown. Indeed, “[t]he implication of the narrative is,” as George Levine writes, “that the act of decentering self is the preliminary moral and intellectual act, allowing new knowledge and new possibilities to enter” (Dying 186), for such decentering is what enables a recognition of the other as other (rather than as similar to oneself) and thus allows for a recognition of other realities (“new knowledge and new possibilities”). However, where Levine, like many critics, only accords such knowledge and possibilities to Deronda—realized in his discovery of his own otherness and “larger destin[y]” outside of England—I believe that this knowledge and possibility are actually accorded to

Gwendolen for it is her future that is deracinated, dislocated, indeed, liberated at the novel’s end.

Deronda may be planning to set sail, but it is Gwendolen who is left in a sea of uncertainty and, therefore, of possibility.

V. In Medias Res: Narrative Middles and the Ethics of Becoming

In Darwin’s Plots Gillian Beer, writing of Eliot’s efforts in Daniel Deronda to disrupt

(even dislocate) the sequential and determinist narratives that shape her earlier novels (and, I would add, the realist novel in general), asks about the possibility of new narratives: 202

A major problematic in this novel is the question of typology—can there be new

movements, new stories? Is it possible to rupture the links of descent and to set out

anew?—(as Daniel Deronda’s mother has attempted to do)—or is genetic inheritance

what most determines us?—(as Daniel’s history might suggest). Can fiction propose fresh

possibilities? Or will it find itself inevitably retelling the old stories to avoid the captious

novelty which in the book is associated with Gwendolen’s willful maiden dreams (of

flight exploration and predominance), the ephemeral expressions of a profound need…. It

is a question indicated by the epigraph to chapter 31: “A wild dedication of yourselves /

To unpath’d waters, undreamed shores.” (182-3)

The Jewish plot, in its simultaneous incursion into and separateness from the English plot, is the force that introduces the possibility of new narratives; however, it is not the Jewish plot itself that is this new narrative. In fact, in its story of Deronda’s search for and acceptance of his inherited identity and higher calling, the Jewish plot tells a very old story, “an almost mythic story,” that

George Levine describes as being “something like a heroic romance” or “quest” (Introduction

17). “[Y]et more [mythic],” Levine claims, is the national epic Deronda is set up to enact at the novel’s end as he prepares to embark on his journey to the East (17). While it is thus tempting to read the Jewish plot as a romance that disrupts the English plot’s realism as Levine does—and while this reading certainly holds merit—it is important to remember that Deronda’s narrative is not all the stuff of romance: his “quest” throughout is also a realist Bildungsroman as he searches for a vocation; moreover, the novel ends with his marriage, a state which, as Eliot tells us in

Middlemarch’s finale, “has been the bourne of so many narratives”—be they realist or romantic

(779). Ultimately, although his story takes a remarkable turn, given its clear roots in both romantic and realist traditions I would suggest that the possibility for new narratives is not given to Deronda. 203

Instead, it is given to Gwendolen and, by extension, to the reader who has been surprised, discomforted, and deracinated alongside her. Rather than being the new narrative, the Jewish plot creates the conditions by which the possibility of new narratives is introduced into the English plot, the English novel, and the English nation by dislodging the supremacy, the exclusivity, and the certainty of the familiar, the old.213 Of Gwendolen: after Deronda leaves her following his disclosure in the novel’s penultimate chapter, she falls into a hysterical fit before falling asleep; this in and of itself is neither new nor promising. However, we are told that “when she waked in the morning light, she looked up fixedly at her mother and said tenderly, “…Don’t be unhappy. I shall live. I shall be better” (DD 692)—a sentiment she reiterates in her letter to Deronda, delivered on his wedding day and printed in full in the last chapter of the novel. The hopeful, potential-filled symbolism of Gwendolen waking in “the morning light” and asserting her will to live and live a better life seems clear—indeed, it is much like Dorothea’s awakening “to a new condition” of greater sympathy “in the chill hours of the morning twilight” after her breakdown following her encounter with Will and Rosamund (MM 740).

Less clear, yet even more significant (since Gwendolen has asserted similar desires to be better before and since hers is, quite pointedly, not to be Dorothea’s story), is the signature she uses on her letter to Deronda: “Gwendolen Grandcourt” (695). As Alex Woloch points out, this is the “first and only time” these two names are joined in the novel, an observation he follows with a provocative interpretation: “The surprising introduction of this appellation” on the last page of the novel “has two interrelated effects: it insists on demonstrating a continued psychological fissure within the diminished heroine, now built definitively into the unfortunate name that she carries (and writes), and it conveys the sense of new information, and new

213 Although Levine does not accord Gwendolen the new possibilities that come with new knowledge, reading her instead as the terminus of Eliot’s self-abnegating heroines, he does read Daniel Deronda as a novel about saving the English nation rather than one advocating the creation of a Jewish one in Dying to Know. 204 questions, still unfolding in the discourse, even here at the very end” (172, emphasis added).

Although at this moment Gwendolen is certainly, as Wolcoh states, “diminished” in her newfound knowledge of the vastness and otherness of the world and her own insignificance within it, both of the effects he accords to her signature are promising as both suggest a subject now permanently in the process of becoming. Indeed, Gwendolen’s writing of her married name suggests an acceptance of her “psychological fissure”—Wolcoh’s term for her “uneasy, reverberating consciousness” (173) and what I earlier described as her dynamic uncertainty and rootlessness—and this acceptance in turn suggests her story—her life—is “still unfolding,” that she is still developing, still becoming, despite our having come to the novel’s end.

In a letter to Blackwood, sent while she was at work on this very ending, Eliot complained that “endings are inevitably the least satisfactory part of any work in which there is any merit of development” (Eliot Letters 6: 241-2); endings, after all, inherently contradict development which is always a process. Thus, in order to ensure there is “any merit” in, indeed, any potential for Gwendolen’s development—which, as I’ve been arguing, is linked to the reader’s and the nation’s (potential) development—Eliot essentially refuses to conclude

Gwendolen’s story. The ending of Daniel Deronda is as unlike the endings in Eliot’s previous works as its beginning is unlike their beginnings for, like its beginning, Daniel Deronda ends in medias res.214 In “The Make-Believe of a Middle” Hilary Schor suggests that one place to locate the middle of a novel is “the moment when things have clearly begun and not yet ended—the moment of greatest narrative…possibility, when questions of “what if?” still radiate around our heroes” (51). Accordingly, because Gwendolen’s life is so clearly still unfolding, because her

214 Although Eliot declares that “[e]very limit is a beginning as well as an ending” in Middlemarch (779), the fact that this sentiment begins the pointedly titled “Finale” and the fact that this finale gazes into the future and briefly sketches the rest of each of the character’s lives—Fred and Mary’s happy marriage, Lydgate’s unhappy marriage and early death, Dorothea’s “incalculably diffusive” life and “unvisited” tomb (785)—suggests that it is not a sentiment applicable to the characters’ stories, which are firmly contained—ended—within the novel.

205 development has begun but not yet ended, and because her fate at the novel’s end is so indeterminate, so filled with possibilities and “what ifs,” “the ending of Daniel Deronda is more truly read not as…an ending at all, but for Gwendolen Harleth at least, as a middle—and a rather promising one at that” (71).215 For Schor, the promise of Gwendolen’s story is found in

Deronda’s question to Hans Meyrick (one of the characters who, we will recall, anticipated a match between the two protagonists), asked shortly after Grandcourt’s death: “Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?” (DD 685). Acknowledging that it may well be Deronda’s jealousy that is asking this question, Schor finds in it “a certain rebellion against marriage and death, nonetheless,” an “invitation to other, more disruptive plots” that implicitly opens-up Gwendolen’s ending and offers her the possibility of something new (“Make-Believe”

71).216 Yet it is not merely the fact that she has been liberated from the conventional marriage- plot that opens-up her narrative possibilities, but that she has been dislocated from her supremacy

(her solipsism, her stupidity, her narrowness, her certainty) and is thus capable of seeing a world beyond her horizon of experience and expectation—a world, that is, beyond herself.

And yet, why then does Eliot not write this new narrative? Why does she leave

Gwendolen—and us—in medias res? The answer, as I see it, returns us to the issue of certainty, of rootedness, of realism—or rather, it returns us to my claim regarding Eliot’s desire to deracinate and dislocate, to challenge and discomfort her readers, her nation—for, to write

Gwendolen’s story would be to define it, to render it certain and complete. This would in turn eliminate the matrix of possibilities that surround her and the nation she represents and would

215 Given Woloch’s insights about Gwendolen’s final signature, I think Schor errs here in referring to Gwendolen by her maiden name: it is the dislodged Gwendolen Grandcourt, not the spoiled Gwendolen Harleth, whose story is now unfolding.

216 By suggesting Gwendolen, although she is still developing, may not marry again (and by having a man who she does not end up marrying be the means through which her development began), Eliot essentially severs the idea of moral education from marriage, implicitly rejecting the Austenian marriage-plot and relocating (female) moral development from the private to the public sphere. 206 allow readers to settle back into their comfortable, certain subject positions. By leaving

Gwendolen’s narrative unsettled Eliot leaves her readers unsettled, which extends to them the possibilities that she has extended to Gwendolen to continue becoming, to continue developing in new and uncertain, uncharted directions. This turn from the potential located within the text to that accorded the reader is one Garrett Stewart makes in his provocative essay, “Beckoning

Death: Daniel Deronda and the Plotting of a Reading,” where he argues that by leaving her narrative in medias res, Eliot reorients the Bildungsroman’s “generic expectations of ‘growth’ or

‘education’…outward to emplot the growth and edification of her own audience” (99). “The model of evolving mentality [put forward by the Bildungsroman,] has,” he suggests, “become less an effectual literary form than a form of literary effect. Openness, promise, potentiality: these now characterize not a hero’s field of action so much as the space of reading” (99). For

Stewart, Daniel Deronda is a novel that compels readers to continually rethink and revise their understanding of it; it demands they be active, critical, uncertain readers. Its open ending makes this an ongoing process, one that not only encourages readers to look backwards to rethink the novel based on their new knowledge (of Deronda, of Gwendolen), but also to look forwards and outwards, to imagine its—and their own—future possibilities. In one of their final encounters,

Deronda says to Gwendolen, “You have made efforts—you will go on making them” (DD 599), and it is this continued willingness to “go on making” efforts—to continue to struggle with and develop in an ever-changing world filled with uncertainty and strangeness—that Eliot presses on her readers in Daniel Deronda as she leaves them at sea rather than rooting them firmly to the ground.

Shortly after Eliot’s death in December of 1880, the Literary News held a contest asking readers to submit “the most striking passages” of thirty words or less from her oeuvre; in June

1881, they printed seventy-one of these “Gems from George Eliot,” including, “It is never too 207 late to be what you might have been” (O’Toole). Submitted without any information about which of Eliot’s works it was from, the origins of the quotation remain a mystery and, according to

Leah Price, it does not show up in any full text searches of Eliot’s work. However, after 1881, the saying was printed in a variety of publications and was always (mis)attributed to Eliot, something that continues to this day and the quotation—ironically one of Eliot’s most famous— appears on everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets (O’Toole). As Price points out, what is “strange is not that the attribution is so persistent” (after all, anything so publically and frequently misattributed is bound to stick), “but that it starts very early” (qtd. in O’Toole); yet, in many ways, the early emergence of this apocryphal saying makes perfect sense since it was precisely this sense of possibility, of perpetual becoming that Eliot urged on her readers, her nation in her last great novel.

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Chapter Four

Consuming Fictions: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and the Trap of Victorian Idyllism

The world often feels certain works of genius to be great, without knowing why: hence it may be that the particular poets and novelists may have had the wrong quality in them noticed and applauded as that which makes them great.

~Thomas Hardy, from The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (3 June 1877)

I think it would hardly be seemly to enlarge on all I admire in your work—or in half of it—the man who can do such work can hardly care about criticism or praise, but I will risk saying how thankful we should be (I know that I speak for other admirers as cordial as myself) for another admission into an English paradise “under the greenwood tree.”

~Algernon Charles Swinburne, from a private letter to Thomas Hardy (1895)

I. Consuming Subjects: Dilution, Delusion, and Desire

In a strikingly self-conscious moment near the middle of Tess of the D’Urbervilles

(1891), Thomas Hardy has his well-beloved heroine, Tess, look beyond the rural world that she knows to the unknown urban world that exists somewhere outside of the Vale of the Great

Dairies, the borders of Wessex, and the pages of her story as she asks Angel about the people who will consume the milk produced at Talbothays Dairy:

“Londoners will drink it [the milk] at their breakfasts to-morrow, won’t they?”

she asked. “Strange people, that we have never seen.”

“Yes—I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When its strength has been

lowered so that it may not get up into their heads.” 209

“Noble men and noble women—ambassadors and centurions—ladies and

tradeswomen—and babies who have never seen a cow.”

“Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions.”

“Who don’t know anything of us, and of where it comes from; or think how we

two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might reach ’em in time.”

(205)

Although the Londoners are anonymous and will remain so, Tess and her world are bound to these “strange people” for their existence in more ways than one; and, as Tess contemplates those who will consume the milk she and Angel have delivered to the little railway-station that connects Talbothays Dairy to the national market, we should recognize that Hardy is also contemplating the men and women who will consume Tess’s story via The Graphic, the nationally syndicated magazine in which Tess of the D’Urbervilles first appeared in weekly installments in 1891. Neither milk nor text, however, arrives intact: just as Tess’s Londoners consume watered-down milk at their breakfast tables, Hardy’s readers consume a bowdlerized version of Tess’s story, weakened for much the same reason as the milk—so as not to “get up into their heads.”217 That both milk and text are diluted for urban consumption suggests two things: that the rural world each represents is not palatable to the urban consumer/reader in its pure, undiluted form—its real form—and that this reality is something of which the urban consumer/reader has no understanding. Tess’s dawning awareness that those who consume milk

“have never seen a cow” and “don’t know anything” of those who produce the milk or the place

“where it comes from,” is also Hardy’s highly critical understanding of his readers who, as T. R.

Wright points out, were “almost exclusively” drawn from upper- and middle-class urbanites

217For thorough discussions of Tess’s serial censorship and subsequent restoration in volume form see chapter 5 of T. R. Wright’s Hardy and His Readers and chapter 6 of Simon Gatrell’s Hardy the Creator, respectively.

210 whose knowledge of the countryside and its inhabitants was limited to—or rather, mediated through—cultural representations (paintings, poems, novels), recreational visits (holidays, excursions), and ancestral recollections (parent’s, grandparent’s) (His Readers 27).218

Hardy’s awareness that his primary audience had little-to-no understanding of the rural realities his texts seemingly looked to was one upon which he established a career and, in many ways, it was Hardy’s capacity “to mediate between essentially rural material and a predominantly urban audience” that made him a popular writer (Millgate 245).219 Indeed, so vivid were his descriptions of rural life that his readers read them as reality—as genuine records of rural England. Initially, however, Hardy’s mediation consisted of superficially diluting and purifying the rural, of representing it in a manner palatable (and therefore consumable, sellable) to his urban readers—a tendency we see most clearly, perhaps, in his second published novel,

Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), which, as the chapter epigraph by Algernon Charles

Swinburne given above suggests, was widely appreciated as a charming prose idyll of rural life by Hardy’s contemporaries, “unforgettable in its sweet good humour” and “charming in its direct naturalness” (qtd. in Dolin, Introduction UTG xxi).220 And, the fact that this book became more popular as Hardy’s later novels became increasingly polemical and their rural scenes less idyllic

(Swinburne’s request to be returned to the “English paradise” found “under the greenwood tree” is, rather pointedly, made shortly after the publication of Hardy’s most controversial novel, Jude

218 Wright, in his study of Hardy’s fraught relationship with and understanding of his readers, argues that “Hardy had a clear mental picture of his imagined audience” (His Readers 2) and was fully aware that he wrote for a predominantly “middle-class metropolitan audience” (30).

219 That Hardy was conscious of this element of his success is suggested by his 1888 essay, “The Profitable Reading of Fiction,” in which he points out that most people read fiction for the “pleasure,” “relaxation and relief” that a mental “change of scene” provides, and, as a result, the “town man finds what he seeks in novels of the country, the countryman in novels of society” (75-6). Given that the majority of England’s reading public lived in cities by the middle of the nineteenth century, Hardy’s decision to write “novels of the country” would seem not simply the most marketable, but the surest way of securing an urban audience.

220 The phrase “unforgettable in its sweet good humour” appears in Samuel C. Chew’s 1928 monograph, Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist, while “charming in its direct naturalness” comes from Harold William’s 1914 essay, “The Wessex Novels of Thomas Hardy.” 211 the Obscure, in 1895), suggests the high level of dilution desired by the affectedly delicate and discriminating palates of his bourgeois readers—their desire, that is, not to see or taste the undiluted, real rural, while at the same time believing they are (qtd. in LW 288). In Tess, however, we see Hardy deliberately mocking the delicate desires and sensitive tastes of his readers via Dairyman Crick, whose early morning chastisements of old Deborah, a peasant labourer at the dairy, crudely disrupt the romantic, Arcadian mornings enjoyed by Angel and

Tess:

When the day grew quite strong and commonplace…they would hear Dairyman Crick’s

voice, lecturing the non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old

Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands:

“For Heaven’s sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul, if the

London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they’d swaller their milk and

butter more mincing than they do a’ready; and that’s saying a good deal.” (147)

The lovers would not be the only ones jolted out of their pastoral paradise by Dairyman Crick’s starkly utilitarian concern over old Deborah’s “slovenly ways”—one can only imagine the repulsion with which Hardy’s readers would have returned (or, quite possibly, refused to return) to “swallering” their breakfast milk after reading this particular installment. As Dairyman Crick’s rather indelicate chastening reminds readers, the rural they so eagerly swallow—at their breakfast tables and in their art—is a rural that does not actually exist. Although Hardy believed that “something (and somewhere) genuinely rural could be found and should be valued,” as

Ralph Pite notes (“His Country” 134), it was not the romantic, idyllic, innocent, sterile image of the rural countryside that had come to dominate the national imagination over the course of the nineteenth century (that “pure” rural in which old Deborah’s hands are perpetually clean and where poverty, class antagonism, and social alienation do not exist); instead, as Raymond 212

Williams has persuasively shown in The Country and the City, the rural Hardy recognized was a dynamic, changing world, no more free of class struggles and corruption, of alienation and artifice, of individuality and innovation, of intelligence and desire than the modern, metropolitan world he wrote for. That said, Hardy’s early understanding of—and scorn for—his reading public’s desire for the fictional ideal of rural England (paired with his own well-documented desire for authorial success221) prompted him to initially give his readers precisely what they wanted: an artificial, ideal image of rural England.

From the very beginning of his career Hardy was praised for his detailed depictions of rural landscapes and rustic life, which were described by critics as “rural pictures full of life and genuine colouring, and drawn with a distinct minuteness” (Moule 11), “pictures of the most delicate and vivid beauty—watercolours in words, and very fine ones too” (Hutton, “Far” 26).

Yet, while these “sketches” of rural England were widely admired for their “genuine fresh flavour of the country”—for, that is, their vivid realism and apparent accuracy—that country,

“genuine,” “fresh,” and realistic as it may appear, is a landscape distinctly mediated by an artist’s hand (Saturday Review, “Far” 39). Indeed, as the language used by each of these early reviewers indicates, there is a certain painterly quality to Hardy’s rural scenes, a self-conscious aestheticism that exposes rather than hides their artistry, and throughout his career the images of rural England that appear in his works are very explicitly and very self-consciously presented as impressions rather than transcriptions, representations rather than realities, inherently setting his

221 Hardy’s autobiography, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (1984)—a work which was originally published posthumously in two volumes as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-91 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 under the guise of a biography penned by his second wife—offers numerous examples of Hardy’s desire for success as a writer, albeit in Hardy’s characteristically ambivalent, oblique manner. For instance, he writes the following when discussing his decision to pursue writing full-time: “For mere popularity he cared little, as little as he did for large payments; but having now to live by the pen—or, as he would quote, “to keep base life afoot”—he had to consider popularity” (105).

213 aesthetic against the realist and naturalist modes he was (and is) typically associated with.222

Although Hardy never articulated a formal theory of aesthetics,223 in one of his many notes on art—this one made while he was at work on Tess, a text he explicitly referred to as an

“impression”224—Hardy suggestively writes that “Art is a disproportioning—(i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportion)—of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence, ‘realism’ is not Art” (LW 239). Dismissing the conventions of realism by deliberately “throwing” realities “out of proportion,” Hardy’s

“distorting” aesthetic implicitly refuses the one-to-one correspondence between life and art that his readers were so eager to attribute to his work. In an attempt to explain Hardy’s privileging of distortion over mimesis, Linda Shires has persuasively claimed that Hardy’s works participate in a “radical aesthetic” that deliberately enacts the distortion of the Ruskinian grotesque,

“reproduc[ing] the myths through which the nineteenth century operated and imagined itself” in order to “critique them” (“Radical Aesthetic” 161). Such “grotesque distortion,” as it were, reveals the fractured and unstable nature of the myths it reproduces by representing the fractured and unstable nature of the reality produced by such myths; accordingly, as this chapter argues, the myth of the idyllic rural that dominated the nineteenth-century national imagination, the myth

222 Victorian reviewers tended to use such painterly analogies to emphasize the accuracy and reality of a novelist’s art, not its fictiveness; throughout his career, such “identifications of Hardy as a painter in a realistic or even naturalistic manner” would become “a recurring motif” in reviews of his fiction as Sarah Maier notes (73). 223 Between 1888 and 1891 (the very years he was at work on Tess of the D’Urbervilles) Hardy published his only formal essays on fiction: “The Profitable Reading of Fiction,” “Candour in English Fiction,” and “The Science of Fiction.” Written upon request or as part of a symposium, these essays are, as Peter Widdowson reminds us, ““occasional” pieces which resolutely refuse to articulate a coherent or systematic theory of fiction” (“Hardy and Critical Theory” 74). Similarly unreliable are Hardy’s short prefaces to the Osgood, McIlvaine and the Macmillan collected editions of his works (published in 1895 and 1912 respectively), which Widdowson describes as being “so clenched with irony as to be thoroughly diversionary” (73). For a detailed discussion of these prefaces see section 4, “Replacing the Rural,” below.

224 In his 1895 Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions Hardy writes that Tess “was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply, and in the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with convictions” (TD 4).

214 of England’s common, pastoral past and rootedness in its rural landscape—indeed, the myth with which Hardy’s own work was and is most closely and self-consciously associated—is the myth he most vehemently critiqued.

To read Hardy as an iconoclastic author who challenged the dominant ideologies of his time by throwing them out of proportion in his writing is very much in keeping with many modern critical and theoretical perspectives of his work. Taken up by materialists (Goode,

Williams, Wotton), feminists (Boumelha, Ingham, Silverman), and poststructuralists (Hillis

Miller and Widdowson) among others, Hardy’s works (particularly his novels) have repeatedly been shown to critique dominant Victorian ideas about class, religion, sexuality, gender, history, and language. And yet, although he is widely accepted as a radically subversive author by academics, Hardy’s non-academic popularity today225 seems to derive largely from his ability to mediate between rural material and an audience unfamiliar with the rural, much as it did in his own time. He is beloved, in other words, not for his radicalism, but for what is understood as his quintessentially English ruralism—a comfortable, comforting idyllic pastoralism that is widely understood to be both nostalgic and loving.226 Indeed, Hardy is generally considered, before all else, to be the historian of Wessex, the chief chronicler and elegist of rural England—which, by the end of the nineteenth century, his “partly real, partly dream county” of Wessex had become largely synonymous with (Hardy, Preface, FMC 4)—and his fictional representations of the rural

225 Not only have Hardy’s novels never been out of print in English (a testament to their continued popularity), but they have also been translated into a number of languages (including Japanese, Romanian, Arabic, German, and French) and many—particularly of the “major” novels—have been adapted (and readapted) into stage plays, radio programs, TV series, and feature films. For information on such adaptations these see chapter 3 of Widdowson’s Hardy in History, Paul J. Niemeyer’s Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, and the essays in Thomas Hardy on Screen, edited by T. R. Wright.

226 In his 2004 essay, “Hardy and His Readers,” Richard Nemesvari notes, “A great deal of Hardy’s continuing non- academic popularity can be traced back to the kinds of reactions encouraged by reading him…through a nostalgia [for the vanished time and place he describes] which acts as a powerful ideological background to his plots” (66). Jonathan Bates likewise claims that the source of Hardy’s “enduring appeal” is the “nostalgia for a simple, honest, rustic way of life among hedgerows, haystacks, and sturdy English oak trees” that he represents for most readers (541).

215 are read as historical documents that faithfully preserve a time and place now past (Barrie 156).

Book critic Jonathan Yardley, in his review of Claire Tomalin’s biography, Thomas Hardy

(2007), for The Washington Post, neatly expresses this popular affection for Hardy’s ruralism when he takes issue with Tomalin’s claim that Hardy’s grief over the death of his first wife,

Emma, gave him his “most perfect subject”; in response to this assertion Yardley writes that

Tomalin’s “literary judgment” is one “with which I must respectfully take issue. To me, Hardy’s

“most perfect subject” was Wessex” (T15). Yardley’s “taking issue” (however respectfully) at

Tomalin’s suggestion that something other than rural England (real or imagined) may have inspired Hardy reveals not only a firmly established idea of Hardy and his work, but a personal and emotional investment in this idea—one Yardley clearly feels his readers share. And indeed, like Hardy’s Victorians readers before them, many do: Hardy continues to be celebrated, above all else, for his pastoral landscapes and nostalgic stories of rural life.

These seemingly disparate Hardys—the disrupter and the defender, the radical and the nostalgic, the critic and the chronicler—have, however, been successfully reconciled by a provocative critical distinction Joe Fisher makes in The Hidden Hardy: A Re-evaluation of

Thomas Hardy’s Prose Fiction between the works Hardy successfully sold to the bourgeois literary market (what Fisher calls “traded-texts”) and the texts that have more overtly subversive narrative strategies and were, therefore, less successful (which Fisher labels “counter-texts”).

Belonging to the former group are those “Novels of Character and Environment” in which

Wessex and the rural (often embodied by a central character) are given primacy. These works include Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Jude the Obscure

(1895), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders

(1887), Under the Greenwood Tree, and two collections of short stories, Life’s Little Ironies

(1894) and Wessex Tales (1888)—that is, the “major” works upon which Hardy’s literary laurels 216

(along with his reputation as the historian of Wessex) rest. The latter group consists of the

“Romances and Fantacies”—A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), The Trumpet-Major (1880), The Well-

Beloved (1897), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), and Two on a Tower (1882)—and the “Novels of Ingenuity”—Desperate Remedies (1871), The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), and A Laodicean

(1881)—in other words, the “minor” works that were for the most part poorly received and critically dismissed (until very recently) because of their seemingly incongruous relationship to the major works—an incongruity that was largely due to their predominantly non-rural focus.227

Fisher goes on to complicate this simple binary by revealing the “hidden Hardy” of his title, a subversive spirit that “runs through all Hardy’s novels” challenging hegemonic authority: “My argument here,” Fisher states in his introduction, “is that in all the prose fictions I examine [that is, all the works Hardy classified as novels] Hardy draws a cartoon of Swiftian brutality on his empty canvas, then covers it…deliberately imperfectly, with what has more usually been regarded as the “finished” text” (7-8). All texts are thus subversive counter-texts, but only some—those that most unreservedly employ the rural ideal (what Fisher calls the “Myth of

Wessex” [2]) —are “finished” enough to be successfully traded in the bourgeois marketplace.

Fisher’s traded-text/counter-text model is a compelling argument that explains the critical/popular disjunction surrounding Hardy’s works; however, it treats the rural as the acceptable cover for Hardy’s radical critique of oppressive patriarchal and class systems and therefore fails to consider the idyllic rural itself—that “Myth of Wessex”—as the focus of the author’s cultural critique.

227 For the 1912 Wessex Edition of his works Hardy sorted his novels and short story collections into the three groups mentioned here. Each volume of the Wessex Edition was printed with a list that indicated the classification of each text as well as a numerical “ranking,” a system that appeared to authorize the “Novels of Character and Environment” as the “major” texts in Hardy’s oeuvre and discredit the other works as flights of fancy or extraneous experiments. Here, I’ve listed the novels in the order Hardy listed them.

217

As has already been intimated, the rural that Hardy critiques is not the genuine, existent rural found in the English countryside (a rural that arguably exists only outside of representation) but the diluted, idealized image of rural England that was so thoughtlessly and eagerly consumed by middle- and upper-class readers—the idyllic and cohesive image of the rural that had come to stand at the centre of the English national identity. Thus, his critique of the rural is also a critique of England’s national identity, which Hardy saw as an elaborate middle-class fiction that denied and destroyed (via its dilution and consumption) the real rural upon which it was founded.228 By reading Hardy’s ruralism as inextricably bound to his “distorting” aesthetic, this chapter explores how Hardy reproduces the myth of the rural in order to critique and subvert that myth, ultimately challenging the idealization of the English countryside—which Pite has wittily dubbed its

“idyllification” (“His Country” 141)—by exposing it and the nation it represented as a destructive and delusive fantasy of the English middle class.

II. Aesthetic Distance: Distortion and Critique in Under the Greenwood

Tree

Hardy’s fraught relationship with his middle-class readers left, as Wright claims,

“permanent traces” in his work (His Readers 3), and his struggle to enter the literary marketplace reveals quite explicitly both his critical attitude towards those readers and their values as well as the narrative strategy through which he learned to express that attitude. In the 1868 letter to

Alexander Macmillan which accompanied Hardy’s first manuscript, “The Poor Man and the

Lady,” Hardy wrote that the “following considerations” had taken place in writing the novel:

228 Hardy, of course, was not alone in his critique, and the nineteenth century saw numerous writers before him, including William Cobbett, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and George Eliot, challenge the public’s romantic construction and consumerist consumption of rural life and the English countryside. For a thorough discussion of how images of rural life became national metaphors—and how many of these writers challenge such images—see Elizabeth Helsinger’s Rural Scenes and National Representation, Britain 1815-1850. 218

That the upper classes of society have been induced to read, before any, books in

which they themselves are painted by a comparative outsider.

That in works of such a kind, unmitigated utterances of strong feeling against the

class to which these readers belong, may lead them to throw down a volume in disgust;

whilst the very same feelings inserted edgewise so to say; half concealed beneath

ambiguous expressions, or at any rate written as if they were not the chief aims of the

book (even though they may be)—become the most attractive remarks of all. (Hardy

Letters 1: 7)

Hardy’s scorn for the egotism of the “upper classes of society” is made obvious here, as is his

“chief aim” of critiquing them by appealing to that very egotism via “ambiguous expressions” that perform the double function of pleasing his audience while concealing his disdain for them.

Given that “The Poor Man and the Lady” was, in Hardy’s own words, “a sweeping dramatic satire of the squirearchy and nobility, London society, the vulgarity of the middle class, modern

Christianity, church restoration, and political and domestic morals in general” (LW 62-3), one imagines his disdain was perhaps less concealed than purported in his letter to Macmillan. In fact, so overt were his feelings that he was advised by George Meredith (the reader for one of the publishing firms to which Hardy sent his manuscript), “not to “nail his colours to the mast” so definitely in a first book” as “he would be attacked on all sides by the conventional reviewers, and his future [as an author] injured” (62). After a few more unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher for his “aggressive…even dangerous” manuscript, Hardy took Meredith’s advice and put “The Poor Man and the Lady” aside to begin work on a less blatantly offensive narrative

(64).229 The result was the “blood-curdling” sensation novel Desperate Remedies,230 which,

229 “The Poor Man and the Lady” was eventually diluted enough for publication as the short story “An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress” (1878), but Hardy’s sense of the dramatic difference between the two is suggested by the 219 although not as deliberately offensive as Hardy describes his first work to have been, does contain subversive features that challenge conventional Victorian attitudes towards class and gender (Tinsley qtd. in LW 91).231 The novel was not a success.232 The two works together, however, establish a deliberately antagonistic attitude towards the upper and middle classes that were to become Hardy’s primary—and intended—reading public as well as the necessity of concealing this attitude in complaisance, however insincere, making his seemingly innocuous and deferential aesthetic decisions regarding his next work and first success, Under the

Greenwood Tree, of particular significance.

As the story in which Hardy is first seen as being “clearly on his own ground”

(Athenaeum, “Greenwood” 9), Under the Greenwood Tree marks a pivotal moment in Hardy’s literary output as the first of the rural novels that were to prove to be the foundation and lifeblood of his success as an author.233 Notably, of Hardy’s first two attempts to break into the literary marketplace the only elements that received undisputed praise were the “handling of the rustic characters” (Millgate 123) and “the country scenes” (LW 88), which were favorably compared to

new form (short story rather than novel), the new title, and the fact that it was never included in the collected editions of his works.

230 In Criticism and Ideology Terry Eagleton argues that all of Hardy’s subsequent work bears the mark of “his fraught productive relation to the metropolitan audience whose spokesmen rejected his first, abrasively radical work” (qtd. in Wright, His Readers 27). 231 For a nuanced discussion of the subversive elements of Desperate Remedies see chapter 1 of Fisher’s The Hidden Hardy.

232 It was not a complete failure either, however, and in addition to a few decent reviews, 370 of the 500 copies printed did sell. That said, it received a particularly scathing review from the Spectator, which, in Hardy’s words, “snuffed out the book” (LW 87), and it ultimately cost Hardy £15 of the £75 guarantee he had paid to the Tinsley Brothers to have the novel published (90).

233 Although Under the Greenwood Tree would become a reader-favourite over the course of the nineteenth century—considered by many to be Hardy’s best work—it initially did not sell very well; it did, however, attract a lot of positive press: as the publisher noted, although sales were “very poor…it was one of the best press-noticed books I ever published” (Tinsely qtd. in Wright, His Readers 55).

220 the immensely popular genre-paintings of Wilkie and Teniers.234 Consequently, in Under the

Greenwood Tree Hardy wrote a novel that gave his audience precisely what they wanted: an abundance of rural scenes and rustic characters drawn in the manner of popular artists of the rural.235 In fact, Hardy’s second published work is so focused on these picturesque images of rural life that it has been criticized for its lack of plot. As one early critic remarked, while Under the Greenwood Tree “makes great advancement in the art of setting,” it “is so largely wanting in the interest both of plot and of character that we are inclined to look upon it hardly in the light of a novel” (Beach 36). The “sheer emphasis on descriptive detail at the expense of character and plot” (Hunter qtd. in Wright, His Readers 60) renders the work, as Wright points out,

“picturesque in Lukàcs’ pejorative sense, accumulating pointless detail which tells us nothing of what is “really” happening” (60). What such criticism of the text fails to consider, however, is

Hardy’s rather telling subtitle, “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School,” which foregrounds the fact that Under the Greenwood Tree is not intended to be looked upon “in the light of a novel,” but rather in the light of a painting. Indeed, the predominantly plot-less, yet highly descriptive narrative and the formally self-conscious subtitle together suggest that Under the Greenwood

Tree is a text less about what is ““really” happening” in rural England and more about the aesthetic representation of rural England as consumed by the English nation. And herein lies its subversive critique of its readers. Having learned from his earlier attempts at social critique that any criticism of his reading public would need to be “inserted edgewise” into his writing, Hardy

234 An unsigned review published in the Spectator on 22 April 1871 claims that the rural scenes of Desperate Remedies “irresistibly” remind one “of the paintings of Wilkie and still more, perhaps, of those of Teniers” (“Desperate” 4).

235 That Hardy’s decision to focus on rural England in Under the Greenwood Tree is a reaction to previous reviews is made clear in a letter written to his publisher, William Tinsley: “I send Under the Greenwood Tree MS. I wish you to bear in mind that the manner & subject of this story are the points in which the critics of Desperate Remedies were unanimous in saying I was strongest, & that, had I no other reasons, that would be one for going further into this class of writing” (Hardy Letters 1: 16).

221 adopts, in Under the Greenwood Tree, a much more subtle approach than is seen in any of his narratives before or after it: rather than overtly challenging dominant ideological constructs through the pointed representation of such challenges, Hardy challenges the very representations on which such ideologies are founded. That is to say, by focusing on the aesthetic representation of the rural Hardy emphasizes its imaginary, artificial nature, implicitly challenging the very reality of the national identity that had come to be founded upon such picturesque, idyllified images of the rural.

Under the Greenwood Tree is, as James Whitehead notes, a work that “seems designed to be quintessentially English” (205, emphasis added). The intensely self-conscious nature of this design is clearly reflected in the text’s pastoralism, which is explicitly linked to England’s literary heritage. That the representation of the rural in Under the Greenwood Tree is part of a literary tradition—thus drawn at least in part from art rather than life—is made explicit both by the novel’s titular allusion to Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, As You Like It (1599),236 a play which presents the rural as an idealized (albeit temporary) retreat for persecuted and lovelorn courtiers, and by the subtitle’s allusion to George Eliot’s national and aesthetic manifesto from

Adam Bede, which looks to the Dutch school of painting as the paradigm for a more realistic literature of the rural and thus a means of achieving a more genuine understanding of—and sympathy for—England’s folk. On the one hand, these allusions to Shakespeare and Eliot effectively insert Hardy’s “short and quiet rustic story” (LW 88) into “a national literature,” which not only placed Shakespeare “at its centre” but also held Eliot as its greatest living author

(Brooker and Widdowson qtd. in Dolin, Introduction UGT xxvii), implicitly suggesting the ambitious scope of Hardy’s work. On the other, by linking the traditional pastoral idealism of

236 Believed to have been written in 1599, As You Like It was first performed in 1603 and published in the First Folio in 1623. The title is taken from a song sung by Amiens, a courtier who faithfully follows Duke Senior into exile. The song is a romanticized vision of life—one found only “under the greenwood tree.” For the lyrics see footnote 244.

222

Shakespeare’s As You Like It with Eliot’s Dutch realism in his novel’s title, Hardy hints at a similarity between these two ostensibly antithetical aesthetics—a similarity that subtly undermines Eliot’s denial of her own rural idyllism. Hardy’s criticism of what he saw as Eliot’s rather unreal rural “realism” is delineated in his response to the rather ironic attribution of his fourth published novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, to the more established author.237 He writes:

In the first week of January 1874 the story [Far From the Madding Crowd] was

noticed in a marked degree by the Spectator, and a guess hazarded that it might be from

the pen of George Eliot—why, the author [Hardy] could never understand, since so far as

he had read that great thinker—one of the greatest living, he thought, though not a born

storyteller by any means—she had never touched the life of the fields: her country-people

having seemed to him, too, more like small townsfolk than rustics; and as evidencing a

woman’s wit cast in country dialogue rather than real country humour, which he regarded

as rather of the Shakespeare and Fielding sort. However he conjectured, as a possible

reason for the flattering guess, that he had latterly been reading Comte’s Positive

Philosophy, and writings of that school, some of whose expressions had thus passed into

his vocabulary, expressions which were also common to George Eliot. (LW 100)

Although his claim that he “could never understand” why his writing should be mistaken for

Eliot’s is highly disingenuous given both his deliberate allusion to her realist agenda in Under the Greenwood Tree and his conscious imitation of many of her narrative strategies in Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy felt that despite Eliot’s efforts to represent the rural truthfully—

“without trying to make things seem better than they were”—she betrayed her purpose by

237 Responding to the first published part of Far From the Madding Crowd, a reviewer for the Spectator concluded that “in every page of these introductory chapters there are a dozen sentences which have the ring of the wit and wisdom of the only truly great English novelist now living” (qtd. in Shires, “Author as Spectacle” 205).

223 inserting her own consciousness and philosophic agenda into the rural, effectively framing her representations in such a manner as to both appeal to and instruct her middle-class readers at the cost of an “authentic” representation of rural realities (AB 160).238 Eliot may not have idealized the rural in the sense of making “things seem better than they were” but, for Hardy, her rural representations are no closer to rural realities than Shakespeare’s; thus, like Shakespeare’s, they simply contribute to a national symbolic in which the rural is an idyllised fiction, crafted for urban, middle-class consumption.

Given Hardy’s skepticism about Eliot’s Dutch painting-inspired realism, his invocation of her aesthetic philosophy in Under the Greenwood Tree seems to be less an announcement of the truthful accuracy of his “story of rural life” than of its (and his) artistry—the fact that it was part of a literary tradition (Hardy Letters 1: 11). It is unsurprising then, that throughout this work we see Hardy doing all he can to emphasize the aestheticized and highly mediated nature of the rural world and its inhabitants, an emphasis that effectively highlights the constructedness of the quintessential England his novel “seems designed” to evoke. Indeed, not only is the story self- consciously presented through the double lens of pastoral romance and Dutch realism but, as Tim

Dolin points out, “[a]t no stage does the narrative attempt a baldly mimetic representation of the social world in this novel; rather it filters its representation through a number of distinct and even contradictory representational conventions, making use of pictorialism, dance-steps, musical forms, ballads, Romantic stereotypes, dramatic tableaux, and more” (Introduction, UGT xxviii).

These filters distort the naturalness—the reality—of Hardy’s representations by overtly pointing to them as representations and therefore decidedly unnatural, unreal. For instance, after

238 In The Country and the City Raymond Williams writes that Eliot’s “country people” can “emerge into personal consciousness only through externally formulated attitudes and ideas” and, although Eliot struggles against “idealized, conventionalized” depictions, she ultimately can only fully express the “personal consciousness” of a character by giving him or her “her own consciousness” (168-9). 224 describing one of the “native manners of the country” (to remove one’s jacket after a period of dancing), the narrator goes on to describe the final stages of a country-dance:

And now a further phase of rural revelry had disclosed itself. It was the time of night

when a guest may write his name in the dust upon the tables and chairs, and a bluish mist

pervades the atmosphere, becoming a distinct halo round the candles; when people’s

nostrils, wrinkles, and crevices in general, seem to be getting gradually plastered up;

when the very fiddlers as well as the dancers get red in the face, the dancers having

advanced farther still towards incandescence, and entered the cadaverous phase; the

fiddlers no longer sit down, but kick back their chairs and saw madly at the strings, with

legs firmly spread and eyes closed, regardless of the visible world. Again and again did

Dick share his Love’s hand with another man, and wheel round; then, more delightfully,

promenade in a circle with her all to himself, his arm holding her waist more firmly each

time, and his elbow getting farther and farther behind her back, till the distance reached

was rather noticeable…Fancy was now held so closely, that Dick and she were

practically one person. The room became to Dick like a picture in a dream; all that he

could remember of it afterwards being the look of the fiddlers going to sleep, as

humming-tops sleep—by increasing their motion and hum, together with the figures of

grandfather James and old Simon Crumpler sitting by the chimney-corner, talking and

nodding in dumb-show, and beating the air to their emphatic sentences like people in a

railway train. (UGT 42-3)239

239 In 1896, when he was revising this novel for the Osgood, McIlvaine Wessex Edition, Hardy changed the concluding simile of this passage to “people near a threshing machine.” In his notes to the Penguin edition of Under the Greenwood Tree, Tim Dolin suggests the change makes the simile “perhaps more appropriate to the rural West of England before 1850” (fn. 2, 202). Perhaps. However, it is also a change that implicitly emphasizes Mellstock’s detachment from the world of Hardy’s readers, who would not only be familiar with the mechanized motions impelled by a railway train (while they would not likely be familiar with those of a threshing machine), but would also register the train as a force physically connecting the rural world depicted with their own. Hardy’s efforts to detach the Wessex landscape from his readers’ reality are discussed at length below. 225

As the description shifts from the narrator’s point of view to Dick’s we are shown a picture within a picture that, accompanied by the triad of arts of which the scene is comprised (music, dancing, and dumb-shows), foregrounds the highly aestheticized nature of the scene. Further, the manner in which the narrator describes the country dance is so thoroughly stylized that the “rural revelry” is transformed into a surreal spectacle: the “bluish mist” that “pervades the atmosphere” of the tranter’s party gives the scene an otherworldly hue that is heightened by the jarring transition the dancers make from a red-faced and incandescent vitality to a “cadaverous phase” in which the red has been concealed by a dusty pallor that “plaster[s]” them up like sculptures. The dancers have themselves become works of art. Moreover, as the dancers continue to twirl and the musicians continue to play the figures lose their identities: Dick Dewey and Fancy Day become

“practically one person,” while the fiddlers, although they remain in the plural, are described as one in thought and action. As the self is given over to art there is a disintegration of being that causes the scene to become “like a picture in a dream”—as unreal to the reader as it seems to

Dick and the fiddlers. Notably, this transition from life to art, from material to spectral, from individual to indistinctive, is a subtle reversal of the book’s much-discussed opening scene in which the soon-to-be forgotten country quire slowly materializes under the moonlight, transforming from a disembodied song to “five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working villagers of the parish of Mellstock” (8, emphasis added).240 Both scenes highlight a process of becoming—of becoming art or becoming real—and it is significant that the novel opens with the latter: that Dick and the others must “emerge from the shade” (8), or “grow in definition,” to borrow Tim Dolin’s descriptions (Introduction, UGT xxix), before the story can begin. Yet, although they have become “real,” the dance sequence reminds us that they—like all

240 For other insightful readings of this scene see J.B. Bullen’s The Expressive Eye, Stephen Spector’s “Flight of Fancy: Characterization in Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree” and Stephen Regan’s “The Darkening Pastoral: Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd.”

226 characters in a novel—are, in reality, merely art. As these two scenes reveal, boundaries between art and life are frequently delineated and then dissolved in Under the Greenwood Tree and we are never sure whether we are looking at an idealized picture—as Dick and the other members of the Mellstock Quire do when they first see Fancy, “framed as a picture by the window- architrave, and unconsciously illuminating her countenance…by a candle she held” (UGT 25)— or whether what we see is real.

The openly self-conscious and highly stylized nature of Hardy’s diction, allusions, and imagery—all of which refuse to hide the hand of the artist, as in the passage cited above—have long been considered to be part of the “problem” of Hardy’s writing: a tendency towards intellectualism, incongruous figurations and allusions, complex syntax and diction, and artificial plotlines, that are not in keeping with his rural (read: simple, natural, and inherently inartistic) subject matter.241 Accordingly, Victorian reviewers frequently complained about Hardy’s

“failure” to achieve full artistic unity and verisimilitude in his novels. For instance, in a review of

Hardy’s The Return of the Native an anonymous critic from the Spectator remarks:

[T]here is one great defect in almost all of Mr. Hardy’s books, which reappears here, that

the strange figures of his Wessex peasantry, though full of picturesque and humorous

elements, are never so presented that the reader is able to accept them as true pictures of

rustic life even on these wild moors […] We almost always find ideas and words more or

less belonging to the stratus of comparative culture, blending with the ideas and words of

rough and superstitious ignorance; and the mingling of the two bewilders and confuses

the reader of his books. (56)

241It was only in the last decades of the 20th century that critics, led in many ways by Dennis Taylor’s trio of studies on Hardy’s poetry (Hardy’s Poetry 1860-1928, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody, and Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology) and J. Hillis Miller’s poststructuralist (re)consideration of Hardy’s language (Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire), began to see Hardy’s linguistic awkwardness in both his poetry and his prose as a quality deserving serious consideration rather than condemnation.

227

This review echoes earlier criticisms of Under the Greenwood Tree where the chief fault of the book was seen to be “the tendency of the author to forget his part, as one may call it, and to make his characters now and then drop their personality, and speak too much like educated people”

(Athenaeum, “Greenwood” 10).242 As Richard Nemesvari has shown, such complaints became a

“standard refrain about Hardy’s rustic characters,” revealing “uneasiness with the hybrid nature of…[a]…style” that was at once acutely realistic and not realistic enough in its representation of the rural world (47). Of course, if we recall Hardy’s critique of Eliot cited above, there is a remarkable—and rather ironic—similarity between the criticisms of Hardy and his criticism of

Eliot. This similarity is ironic, however, not because it reveals Hardy to have committed the same artistic fault he complained of in Eliot, but rather because it shows how fully Hardy’s critics misread his strategy of representation. That Hardy’s contradictory representational conventions disrupt popular conceptions of the rural by challenging what was commonly thought of as realism—and ruralism—is, quite distinctly, the point. Indeed, Hardy meticulously performs

Eliot’s version of realism to a higher degree than Eliot herself,243 tipping the scale of representation from realist to anti-realist in his works: his pedantic “intrusions” and incongruent intellectualism constantly remind the reader of a narrative presence distinct from the scene and people narrated, a presence which in turn highlights the mediated nature of even the most

242 Horace Moule’s review in Saturday Review also points to the “occasional tendency of the country folk, not so much to think with something of subtle distinction…but to express themselves in the language of the author’s manner of thought rather than in their own” as a “definite fault” in the writing (13).

243 In a remarkable review of Far From the Madding Crowd that picks up on Hardy’s superficial imitation of Eliot as a deceptive and disingenuous impression, Henry James writes: [T]he author [Hardy] has evidently read to good purpose the low-life chapters in George Eliot’s novels; he has caught very happily her trick of seeming to humour benignantly her queer people and look down at them from the heights of analytic omniscience. But we have quoted the episode [from chapter 8] because it seems to us an excellent example of the cleverness which is only cleverness, of the difference between original and imitative talent…. [H]is novel, at a cursory glance, has a rather promising air of life and warmth. But by critics who prefer a grain of substance to a pound of shadow it will, we think, be pronounced a decidedly delusive performance… (28, emphasis added) James concludes the review with the uncertain but penetrating impression that although “Mr. Hardy…rarely gets beyond ambitious artifice,” he “has gone astray very cleverly, and his superficial novel is a really curious imitation of something better” (31, emphasis added). 228 realistic representations. At the same time, the self-consciously aestheticized descriptions repeatedly jar the reader out of the text with the reminder that the rural images he is consuming are not actually images of an existent rural reality but of a fiction of a rural “reality.” By distorting or throwing out of proportion various aspects of the rural in his descriptions, Hardy so thoroughly undermines the reality of rural England within his narratives that his readers are driven to see it precisely as Hardy sees Shakespeare’s and Eliot’s rural representations: as fictions of the artist.

In addition to foregrounding the constructed, aestheticized nature of his and his predecessors’ narratives and the ideal rural world therein, Hardy’s self-conscious style distances the reader from the world of his text. Not only are we repeatedly reminded that his novel is a work of art, but we are teased by the fundamental inaccessibility of the rural world it pictures for us. Indeed, when the novel first appeared, Mellstock, the primary setting of Under the

Greenwood Tree, was very clearly a “world outside the gates of the world” (Dolin, Introduction,

UGT xxvi): an imagined country village that, although bound to England by its distinctive traditions and West Country dialect, was separated from the real nation by its unmappable, impenetrable fictionality. Printed in London for Londoners, Hardy’s novel, like Amiens’s song of the greenwood tree in As You Like It,244 at first appears to offer a pastoral escape from the pressures of urban, civilized life—a comfortable, comforting retreat from the complexities of modern life; however, as Hardy intimates via his aesthetic distortions, it is an illusory escape and

244 Under the greenwood tree Who doth ambition shun Who loves to lie with me, And loves to live i' the sun, And turn his merry note Seeking the food he eats, Unto the sweet bird's throat, And pleased with what he gets, Come hither, come hither, come hither: Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see Here shall he see No enemy No enemy But winter and rough weather. But winter and rough weather. (Shakespeare II.v.1-8, 38-45) […]

229 the novel’s penultimate line rings with irony as it beckons readers to “Come hither, come hither, come hither!” knowing all the while “hither”—either Mellstock or the ideal of rural England it represents—is nowhere to be found (UGT 159).

And yet, for all that, “come hither” readers eventually did—or at least attempted.

Although the tourism associated with Hardy’s fiction would not begin in earnest until the last decade of the nineteenth century, Horace Moule’s laudatory review of Under the Greenwood

Tree reflects an early sense of Hardy’s literary landscapes and rural representations as accurate guides to the actual English countryside. After praising Hardy’s story as “the best prose idyl that we have seen for a long while,” Moule writes:

[B]esides being a novel of great humour and general merit, it would make no bad manual

for any one who, from duty or from choice, is desirous to learn something of the inner life

of a rural perish…. It is a book that might well lie on the table of any well-ordered

country house, and that might also be borne in mind by the readers during kindly rounds

undertaken among the cottages. (11-13, emphasis added)

Giving no indication that there is anything remotely contradictory about an “idyl” being a

“manual” to reality, Moule conflates the ideal/idyll with the real, ignoring—or missing—all of

Hardy’s distortions which foreground the intrinsic unreality of the novel and the image of rural

England therein. Such misreadings and (mis-)appropriations of Hardy’s rural fictions as maps to rural realities would continue throughout his career in spite of the frequent and pointed criticism of his “artificial” and “studied simplicity” (Saturday Review, “Return” 51), his “disfigured” descriptions (Athenaeum, “Return” 47), and the “unnatural effect” of his style (Athenaeum,

“Trumpet” 71). Hardy responded to the collective unwillingness to see these distortions as anything other than authorial flaws by becoming increasingly insistent about the imaginary nature of the rural his readers so thoughtlessly consumed. Not only did he craft increasingly 230 melodramatic, sensational plots—his stories turning on points of extreme coincidence, infidelity, bigamy, wife-sales, murder, and child-suicide—but he also inundated his novels with rhetorical and aesthetic contradictions that highlighted the incongruous nature of fiction and reality including flat, unconvincing characterizations, abstract pictorialism, pedantic allusions, unmappable locales, and self-conscious, fragmented intertextualities.245 Ultimately, however,

Hardy’s imaginary rural found its fullest manifestation in his “merely realistic dream country”246 of Wessex (Hardy qtd. in Gatrell, Hardy the Creator 130, emphasis added), that imaginary expanse of land which would, ironically, become responsible for Hardy’s legacy as the nineteenth century’s most beloved chronicler of rural England.247

Hardly a coherent geographical region at first, the fictional landscape in which all of

Hardy’s novels came to be set was gradually delineated over the whole of his career; thus, when

Desperate Remedies appeared in 1871, Hardy had not yet conceived of Wessex and, when the term is first employed three years later in Far From the Madding Crowd, it is only used in passing to give the impression that the fictional town of Greenhill exists in a broader region from which people come to attend its annual fair.248 However, in the second half of the1880s with the publication of The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, and Wessex Tales—all of which are placed within a progressively coherent and unified landscape—it is clear that “Wessex as a

245 In his 1892 review of Tess, Mowbray Morris wrote on Hardy’s increasingly alienating style: “indeed [Hardy] is too apt to affect a certain preciosity of phrase which has a somewhat incongruous effect in a tale of rustic life; he is too fond—and the practice has been growing on him through all his later books—of writing like a man ‘who has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps’” (220).

246 From Hardy’s 1895 preface to Far From the Madding Crowd, published by Osgood, McIlvine.

247 R.G. Cox’s introductory overview of the early criticism of Hardy’s novels reveals that, by the end of the century, he stood above Eliot as the preeminent Victorian writer of the rural: “As Hardy developed his characteristic rural themes, George Eliot increasingly appeared the obvious comparison, and for the more discerning, a standard by which to judge him…[However,] as George Eliot’s reputation declined in the reaction soon after her death, she was less often invoked as a standard of comparison, and critics even began to blame her influence for the pedantic element [they saw] in Hardy’s style” (xliv).

248 Hardy writes: “Greenhill was the Nijnii Novgorod of South Wessex; and the busiest, merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was the day of the sheep-fair” (FMC 327).

231 region had come to be a very powerful concept” for Hardy and was, from this point forward, “to be taken into account whenever he began a story or a novel” (Gatrell, Hardy the Creator 124).

The centrality of Wessex to Hardy’s late narrative vision is made abundantly clear with what was to become his most successful novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.249 As “the first full-length novel to be launched into a fully pre-existent fictional geography” (Watson 179), Tess has a more completely realized topographic structure than any of Hardy’s previous works and expands the

Wessex region substantially while simultaneously building upon its existent parts through internal reference or return. Indeed, in her journeys Tess traverses much of Wessex, wandering northeast from South Wessex, where most of Hardy’s previous novels had been set (although, before Tess, it had not been cohered under the appellation “South Wessex”), into the newly added counties of Mid and Upper Wessex, where she is respectively arrested and executed. The immense popularity of Tess—derived in equal parts from its sensational notoriety, its titular (and titillating) heroine, and its vivid rural scenes—catapulted both Hardy and Wessex into the national imagination, inspiring generations of “literary pilgrims”250 to venture forward, Hardy books in hand, “hunt[ing],” as Hardy would wryly put it in his 1912 General Preface to the

Novels and Poems for “the real” (47). The “real” that they were hunting for was, of course, the

“real” Wessex of Hardy’s fictional narratives: the real rural locations on which Hardy’s representations were supposedly based—representations that had, much to Hardy’s exasperation, come to symbolize not only the rural world, but the authentic, homogeneous, tranquil, and idyllic

England believed to be embedded in that world.

249 The controversy that surrounded the serial version of the novel ensured that the volume edition would sell well— and it did. Within a year five editions were put out, with the one volume ‘Fifth Edition’ of September of 1892, going through five impressions totaling 17,000 copies by the end of the year. The novel also sold well in the United States and Europe. As Wright notes, “In terms of sheer sales Tess turned Hardy into a ‘major’ writer” (His Readers 179). For more details on the sales and the critical fallout see Chapter 5 of Wright’s Hardy and His Readers.

250 This term is adopted from W.J. Keith’s essay “Thomas Hardy and the Literary Pilgrims”. 232

Although written before the deluge of “Wessex” tourists, Tess, as the following section will argue, is a novel very much about the delusory pursuit of the “real” rural that Hardy identified as so intrinsic to both urban reader and tourist, and so destructive to the rural world they all sought. Having been unable to dismantle the fantasy of rural England by exposing it as a product of artistic and ideological idyllism, Hardy produces in Tess a novel about the attempt to realize—to obtain, possess, define, and consume—the rural idyll/ideal and the disastrous, destructive consequences of such an attempt.

III. Pursuing Tess: Idyllism and Inscription in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

When Fancy Day is framed by the window and lit by her candle she is aestheticized and illuminated, becoming an ideal of sorts for the singers below her:

“How pretty!” exclaimed Dick Dewy.

“If she’d been rale wexwork she couldn’t ha’ been comelier,” said Michael Mail.

“As near a thing to a spiritual vision as I ever wish to see!” said tranter Dewy

fervently.

“O, sich I never, never see!” said Leaf.

All the rest, after clearing their throats and adjusting their hats, agreed that such a

sight was worth singing for. (UGT 26)

In this exchange each comment enhances Fancy’s perfection, increasingly detaching her from any material reality until Leaf denies her existence completely. Dick, the most restrained, in his praise, becomes the most enchanted with this “spiritual vision” and the remainder of the story follows his attempts to realize this ideal. However, as the succession of comments suggest, the ideal doesn’t really exist and Fancy, as Dick sees her, is less a “spiritual vision” than an imaginary construct of “poetic allusion and rhetorical figures” (Spector 470)—or, in this case, of 233 a window frame, some candlelight, and an abundance of male desire.251 While Dick gets the girl, so to speak, without ever being disabused of his idealized conception of her, the novel’s “happy ending” is rendered ironic by the reader’s awareness that Fancy is nowhere near the “artless and good…darling” Dick believes her to be (UGT 159). To emphasize this irony, ensuring that the reader doesn’t miss it, the novel closes with the newly married Dick declaring their complete confidence in one another—“We’ll have no secrets from each other, darling, will we ever?”— and Fancy agreeing with him, even as she thinks “of a secret she should never tell” (159).252

This story of delusive idealism is one that is told over and over again by Hardy, always with a slightly different—and increasingly disastrous—conclusion. In Far From the Madding

Crowd, for instance, Bathsheba Everdene is the idealized figure and Farmer Boldwood’s unsuccessful pursuit of this ideal leads to obsession, insanity, and murder. Gabriel Oak, who eventually succeeds where Boldwood could not, only does so once “hard prosaic reality” has revealed “the rougher side” of Bathsheba’s character to him, thus enabling the two to settle into a

“good-fellowship” that leads to a powerful love, “beside which passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam” (383-4). Bathsheba and Gabriel are, however, the last of Hardy’s creations to get such a happy ending. Hardy’s subsequent novels, including The Return of the

Native, The Woodlanders, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) (rewritten and re-titled The

251 R. Knight’s frontispiece illustration for the William Tinsley’s 1875 Christmas edition of Under the Greenwood Tree (later reprinted in the 1878 Chatto and Windus edition) captures the men’s idealization and aestheticization of Fancy Day perfectly: a large image of her head and shoulders, surrounded by angels, bells, and holly is projected above the quire, who are positioned in miniature below her (see figure 4.1).

252 This irony is, in a way, part of the “melancholy” Wright identifies as “lurking beneath the surface of the comedy in Under the Greenwood Tree” for, while Hardy’s “rustic characters may remain happy…readers “who look deeply enough” know that their happiness is an illusion” (His Readers 60). Of course, Hardy’s readers didn’t look very deeply at all and the work was celebrated for its “genial charm” well into the 20th century (Trent qtd. in Wright, His Readers 57).

234

Well-Beloved in 1897), and Jude the Obscure, all contain versions of this same story but in these the pursuit only leads to disappointment, disillusionment and, more often than not, death.253

Hardy’s most celebrated novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully

Presented by Thomas Hardy, also tells this story. Here, however, it is not simply the story of an idealized woman pursued, consumed, and destroyed by an idealizing man that he tells, but the story of rural England invaded, exploited, and ultimately destroyed by the idyllising middle-class nation. That Hardy was consciously “mak[ing] war” on his bourgeois readers in Tess seemed clear enough to Annie Macdonell, whose 1894 study of the author claims that Hardy easily could have toned down—diluted—Tess and “carried all his readers with him” had he so desired (qtd. in

Wright, His Readers 184). But he didn’t. Having had enough of dilution, Hardy constructs Tess in such a manner as to confront his readers at every turn, pointedly implicating them in Tess’s tragedy by aligning them with Tess’s triumvirate of middle-class oppressors. Imagined and idealized by Alec D’Urberville, Angel Clare, and the narrator—each of whom lays claim to the readerly position—Tess has meaning(s) “traced” or inscribed upon her, and her fate is determined—herself destroyed—by these inscriptions (T 82). The critical relationship between

253 The Return of the Native darkens this story further: Eustacia Vye, we are told, is made of “the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation” (62). This divine aspect is, however, explicitly described as being incompatible with humanity: “She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman” (63). But Clym Yeobright, the eponymous native, fails to realize this incompatibility, and pursues Eustacia despite all warnings that she will “ruin” him (197). And she does, just as she ruins herself by refusing to moderate her passionate excesses. She ends up dead, while he lives on, his body (and life) “marked with decay” (411). Another variation is offered in The Woodlanders, where Edred Fitzpiers’s idealizing eyes first settle on Grace Melbury, signaling her out as possibly being the wealthy Mrs. Felice Charmond, “of whom he had heard so much”; in this form she appears to Fitzpiers to be one who is “[l]ike the bright shade of some immortal dream” (114). Although the self-absorbed Fitzpiers willingly acknowledges that the figure he is in love with is “something in my own head, and no thing-in-itself outside it at all,” he still persists in pursuit, winning Grace’s hand then promptly abandoning her once his ideal prototype, Felice, returns to Hintock (115). Fitzpiers’s repeated attempts to realize an imagined ideal in the real foreshadows Jocelyn Pearston/Pierston’s more comic attempts to acquire his ever elusive “Well-Beloved” in The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved / The Well-Beloved. Imposing his single descriptive label to multiple women, Jocelyn denies their individuality as he attempts to realize his ideal—his Well-Beloved—in material form. Finally, in Hardy’s most apoplectic novel, Jude the Obscure, we have Jude, who falls in love with a picture of his cousin whom he pursues, first to Christminster then to Melchester and on to Shaston where he finally “gets” her. This realization is, however, also their undoing and the two suffer perhaps more than any of Hardy’s creations besides Tess. For a more detailed discussion of Jude see section 5, “Ginning Jude,” in which I discuss the trap of Victorian idyllism.

235 reader and “lover”/creator was inadvertently highlighted first by Mowbray Morris in his rather caustic review of the novel when he compares Hardy to a “slave-dealer appraising his wares

[Tess, and her “sensual qualifications”] to some full-blooded pasha” (221). Clearly intended to be derogatory towards the author (whom he erroneously conflates with the narrator), what probably wasn’t intended—regardless of how apt—was the resultant and equally derogatory analogy between the reader and that “full-blooded pasha” who so ardently envisions (and presumably exploits) the “wares” Hardy’s narrator parades before him. Given the apposite nature of this analogy it is of little surprise that Hardy found the review both “amusing & smart,” as he remarked in a letter to Roden Noel (Hardy Letters 1: 264). More recently—and more intentionally—John Goode, in his seminal essay, “Woman and the Literary Text,” highlights the same uneasy relationship between the reader and the narrative; Peter Widdowson summarizes

Goode’s insight: “what we witness (and are implicated in) is “the objectification of Tess by the narrator,” especially by way of making her the “object of consumption” of Alec and Angel (and then of us as voyeuristic readers consuming with our eyes both the text and, hence, Tess herself)”

(“Faithfully Presented” 7-8). While this reading of Tess has been significantly elaborated upon since Goode’s 1976 essay (and Morris’s 1892 review), the existence of a determining male gaze that constructs and consumes Tess both in and out of the text remains central to many critical discussions of the novel,254 and in this mine is no different. What I would like to add to this reading, however, is the idea that the male gaze which constructs Tess is an overtly middle-class gaze that aligns Tess with (and sees her through) the ideal of rural England, which is thus shown to be similarly constructed, consumed, and destroyed by the delusive and determining idyllism of that gaze.

254 Examples of such critical discussions include: Jeff Nunokawa’s article on “Tess, Tourism, and the Spectacle of the Woman,” Kaja Silverman’s “History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” Peter Widdowson’s elaborate introduction to the New Casebook Study of Tess, and George Wotton’s book, Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism.

236

In Tess Alec and Angel are the embodied manifestations of this masculine, middle-class gaze. Although described as opposites—Angel, after all, “plays the harp” while Alec “wields the pitchfork”—the two are less antithetical than this analogy initially suggests (Boumelha,

Introduction xxiii). After all, while the angel/devil divide metaphysically denotes a moral difference between the men (albeit one that is self-consciously assumed, at least by Alec), it still suggests a similarly distant subject-position with regard to the material world of rural England and, ultimately, to Tess, whom both men imaginatively ascribe to and align with that world. In this vein, both Alec and Angel are set up as outsiders to the rural: Alec’s family, we are told, came to Wessex from a manufacturing town in the North where his father, Mr. Simon Stoke,

“had made his fortune as an honest merchant” (T 44). Angel, on the other hand, is the son of a vicar, and, although born in Wessex, remains distinct from its rural culture by his class and education.255 Their similar non-native, middle-class positions engender analogous attitudes towards the rural world, which are symbolized through their respective relationships to the countryside: Alec lives in a new country house, built for “enjoyment pure and simple” with a

“fancy farm” kept for pleasure rather than need (43) while Angel travels Wessex “as a student of kine” (133), studying rural customs and methods of farming “with a view either to the Colonies, or the tenure of a home-farm” (130); both, however, inherently objectify and exploit the rural as they pursue their own desires within it. Their sense of Tess is, likewise, very similar: both see her as the embodiment of the rural world—a “pure” country girl and “daughter of the soil” (142).

The narrator deliberately encourages the reader to share this perception, his first assessment of

Tess being that she is “a fine and picturesque country girl, and no more” (21). However, as their respective relationships to both conventional morality and the rural suggest, Alec and Angel do

255 In recognition of this distinction Mrs. Crick adamantly refuses to let Angel eat at the same table as the rest of the workers at Talbothays, so he instead sits apart, “in the yawing chimney-corner during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinge flap at his elbow” (134-5). The absurdity of this senseless segregation points towards the absurdity of such transparently artificial class distinctions.

237 understand Tess’s embodiment of the rural differently: the dissolute and hedonistic Alec sees her as a quintessential “bouncing” (59) “cottage girl” (61), thus available for (and possibly receptive to) his physical pleasure—much as the rustic Darch sisters (those “children of the open air” [77]) are; while the intellectual and ascetic Angel sees her as a “fresh and virginal daughter of Nature”

(136), thus available for his study and idealization—much as Talbothay’s Dairy is. The narrator’s position alternates between Alec’s and Angel’s (although like them he also stands outside the rural world he describes), focusing at times on Tess’s sensual physicality—her mouth, her eyes, her arms, her bosom—and at other times on her affinity with Nature—her animal-like behaviour, her loss of “margin” within the fields (100), her harmony with the Wessex landscape—and her innocence—her “pink and flawless” beauty (119), her artlessness, her “simple life” (214). The reader, guided by the narrator, thus oscillates between the perspectives of Alec and Angel, effectively inhabiting and participating in both perceptions of Tess. Therefore when the men, after imposing their respective rural stereotypes on Tess and inscribing her with a meaning that matches their rural desires, impose themselves on her, objectifying then exploiting her in much the same way they do rural England, the reader is their implied accomplice.

Hedonist that he is, Alec lays claim to Tess’s body, idealizing, objectifying, and exploiting her sexually. This physical imposition is, quite literally, traced upon her body: first with roses, which he places in her bosom and hat, then with his lips as he kisses her cheek, and finally with his own body as he rapes her. And, just as the roses superficially transform Tess’s dress, so does intercourse transform her body—albeit in a more lasting manner. Not only does her figure change with the child she bears, but her “sorrow”256 transforms her from “simple girl to complex woman”—changes that also manifest themselves physically: “Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy at times into her voice. Her eyes grew

256 Sorrow is also the name Tess gives her child (107). 238 larger and more eloquent. She became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and arresting” (112). Alec’s sexual, self-gratifying gaze impresses itself on Tess but, despite the physical transformation it engenders, Tess’s “soul,” we are told, remains untouched, revealing itself as one which “the turbulent experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize” (112, emphasis added). Tess’s inner sturdiness is thus revealed and, despite Alec’s physical inscription and exploitation of her, she continues to feel “the pulse of hopeful life warm within her”—she continues, that is, to possess a life and identity—a reality and truth—of her own, independent of him and his impositions upon her (112).

These hopes and this reality are, however, short-lived. As Hardy takes pains to make clear, Angel’s insistent, “ethereal” (211) idealization of Tess’s “rustic innocence” (258) proves to be far more damaging than Alec’s more explicitly violent impositions. Where Alec affects Tess externally by viewing her as a sensual body to enjoy, Angel affects her internally by viewing her as a symbol of an imaginary ideal. In the “luminous gloom” of the morning light at Talbothays

Farm, Angel calls Tess “Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names” (145-6), endearments that reveal the “imaginative and ethereal” centre of his love for her (211). These names, however, also reveal the irreconcilable contradictions embedded in his idealization of her and of the rural world she represents to him: Artemis, virginal goddess of the hunt, speaks to Angel’s worship of sexual purity, yet she also suggests the ever-elusive, unrealizable nature of that ideal as any man to see her was killed in order to preserve her purity. Demeter, goddess of fertility, agriculture, and the seasons, points to Angel’s idyllised vision of the rural; she challenges the sterile definition of purity he associates with Artemis and the rural, however, by emphasizing the rural world’s dependence on its physical renewal and fecundity. Essentially, as his paradoxical allusions suggest, Angel imagines Tess to be something she cannot possibly be. Tess’s response to such deification is to ask that he “call [her] Tess,” a request that implicitly asserts both her 239 individuality and her immanent profanity (146). It is both these qualities, however, that Angel’s idealization of her (and the rural purity she represents for him) denies. In his adoration Angel abstracts Tess, inherently repressing, denying her reality—her past experiences, her physical presence, and her individual subjectivity—and replacing that reality with an illusory image of rustic innocence that does not and cannot exist: his love, we are told, “was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability” (264). As Tess herself despairingly realizes shortly before their marriage, the woman Angel loves “is not [her] real self, but one in [her] image” (233). And, although Angel “sometimes thinks he delights in her for her very self” rather than the ideal she represents for him, “the crisis of their relationship”—when he is finally confronted with Tess’s actuality (in the form of her past experiences with Alec)—reveals his preference for the ideal over the real (Blake 94). Like the Londoners who will only consume their milk when they believe in the cleanliness of old Deborah’s hands (thus the purity of the product they are consuming), Angel only loves “Tess” when he believes in the illusion of her rustic innocence.

Consequently, when she tells him of her experience with Alec his response is to deny any relationship between his ideal and his now-wife: “You were one person: now you are another….the woman I have been loving is not you…[but] another in your shape” (T 248-9).

Although Alec inscribes and alters Tess’s body with his physical objectification and violence,

Angel effaces her “very self”—her reality—with his visionary idealism.

The tragic, troubling consequence of this effacement is Tess’s loss of self: not only does she “pick up his [Angel’s] vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his knowledge” (193)— acquisitions that render her out of place in the rural landscape she is forced to remain within after he abandons her257—but, as Alec so derisively points out, she also adopts his beliefs: “The fact

257 As she walks along the road to Flintcombe-Ash Tess, we are told, encounters “difficulties” because of the “attention she excite[s] by her appearance, a certain bearing of distinction which she had caught from Clare being superadded to her natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been prepared for her marriage these 240 is…whatever your dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject…Your mind is enslaved to his” (341). And Alec is right. Tess, as Hardy makes clear, ultimately condemns herself because Angel condemns her, labouring in the fields at Flintcombe as penance for the sins he ascribes to her. Nowhere is Tess’s internalization of Angel’s beliefs more apparent than in the pathetic letter she writes him, begging him to return: “The punishment you have measured out to me is deserved—I do know that—well deserved, and you are right and just to be angry with me. But Angel, please, please, not to be just—only a little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it, and come to me” (356).258 The pathos of this letter along with Tess’s willingness to subject herself to the physical and emotional hardship of Flintcombe-Ash Farm force the reader to recognize the abusive and destructive nature of Angel’s abstract idealism for it has driven Tess to this broken state.259

The culmination of Tess’s assumption of Angel’s beliefs is, ultimately, her own unconscious repudiation of her actual, material existence. This repudiation climactically leads not only to her return to Alec but to her subsequent murder of him, carried out, as Angel comes to realize, only after “Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers— allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will”

(401). Having lost all hope, all sense of value or identity beyond the abstract ideal and its casual glances of interest caused her no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the wrapper of a fieldwoman rude words were addressed to her more than once…” (295). She is no longer capable of “assimilat[ing] herself with [her surroundings]” as she was before encountering Angel’s idealizing gaze (100).

258 This letter is of particular significance because it is the only time we are explicitly told how Tess interprets what has become recognized as her “fall” as her earlier confession to Angel (like the fall itself) takes place in the lacuna between books. Of course at this point Tess’s interpretation has been entirely shaped by Angel’s view of her and Hardy’s decision to make this letter the single vocalization of Tess’s views should be read as a reinforcement of his concern over Tess’s effacement.

259 Tess of course is not the only woman Angel “destroys,” however inadvertently. The other milkmaids from Talbothays are also in love with Angel (a fact he is well aware of) and are all affected in different ways by his marriage to Tess and his departure from the farm: Retty attempts suicide, Marian turns to drink, Izz Huett loses the urge to sing; and, while all the women leave Talbothays, they are, we are told, perpetually living “in memories of green sunny romantic Talbothays,” suggesting that they too are tortured by impossible idylls/ideals that they associated with Angel (305).

241 damning counterpart that Angel has impressed on her, Tess no longer registers her reality. By the end of the novel Tess has so fully adopted Angel’s perspective that she calmly accepts the fact of her death and begs Angel to replace her with her sister, another “picturesque country girl,” once she is gone:

Angel…will you watch over Liza-Lu for my sake?...She is so good, and simple, and

pure….O Angel—I wish you would marry her, if you lose me, as you will do

shortly…She has all the best of me without the bad of me; and if she were to become

yours it would almost seem as if death had not divided us. (416)

As Tess realizes, the sisters are interchangeable when it comes to Angel’s ideal of rustic purity— like the young girls at the May Day celebration between whom Angel cannot differentiate260— because the ideal is an abstraction, an idea, and thus not bound to any particular individual or material reality. Moreover, Tess’s acceptance of her own abstraction, her lack of margin as it were, ultimately and ironically undermines the novel’s tragedy, deliberately denying the reader any cathartic release through Tess’s suffering. As Penny Boumelha points out, “Tragedy is, characteristically, a literary mode focused on the exceptional individual whose downfall leaves the world poorer, shaped by their absence. It is a final poignant irony of Tess that its heroine, however vivid her presence and however moving her suffering, is denied at the last the grandeur of such a traditional tragic ending” (Introduction xxvi, emphasis added). Tess loses all claim not just to individuality but to ontological being when she accepts Angel’s idyllisation of her and her world; her replacement by Liza-Lu and the black flag that rises to announce her death conclusively transform Tess into precisely what she had been to Angel in life: a symbol or abstraction of something else. Like the Mellstock Quire’s apotheosizing of Fancy, Angel has

260 Angel, an interested spectator to this rural tradition, offers to partner one of the girls in their dance and is told to “pick and choose”; however, they all prove the same to him: “The young man thus invited glanced them over, and attempted some discrimination; but as the group were all so new to him he could not very well exercise it” (23). Notably, he does not pick Tess. 242 imaginatively idealized Tess to the point of denying and destroying her reality; however, unlike the narrative of Under the Greenwood Tree, Tess/Tess directly confronts Angel—and the reader—with that spectacle of violence that is the result of such idealization.

IV. Re-placing the Rural: Collecting, Correcting, and Controlling Wessex

In Tess, then, the pursuit of the ideal (rural Tess) is shown to destroy the reality (real

Tess) upon which the ideal is purportedly founded. By aligning the idealization of Tess with that of the rural landscape, Hardy gestures towards the destruction inherent in the middle-class desire to see the idyllised rural of art and literature as indicative of the real, visitable rural of the English nation. In her article, “Emily’s Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction, Folklore, and

Photography,” Nancy Armstrong writes of how mid-century enthusiasm for images and narratives of rural, “untrammeled,” England led to an invasion of the countryside that resulted in the destruction of the very thing sought: “authentic” England (247). However, in Tess Hardy shows this authentic England to have never existed—at least not in the manner imagined by its bourgeois consumers: just as Tess is not (nor ever could be) the divinely “pure,” virgin territory

Angel desires and imagines her to be,261 the rural landscape is not (nor ever was) the idyllic, untrammeled paradise of popular imagination. We see this most clearly, perhaps, in the oft- quoted opening of Chapter 2, which, in introducing the reader to Tess’s home in the Vale of

Blackmore, initially seems to present him with precisely the idyllic landscape he so desires: “The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or

Blackmoor aforesaid—an engirdled and secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by

261 Significantly, Tess is not originally corrupted by Alec’s predatory gaze (and hands); rather, as the narrative makes clear, Tess is conscious of living on a “blighted” star long before she ever encounters Alec for, as she tells her brother, if they lived on a “sound one” “father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go this journey; and mother wouldn’t have been always washing, and never getting finished” (37). Given this rather justified cynicism, we are forced to recognize Tess’s innocence/purity/inexperience as a construct of Angel’s apotheosizing gaze.

243 tourist or landscape-painter, though within a four hours’ journey from London” (T 18).

Deploying the “well-developed language of the guidebook” (Watson 179), Hardy situates the reader as a tourist who, in a mere four hours of travel, could presumably access this

“beautiful…secluded region” himself. Having established the apparent ease with which one could arrive in this rural paradise, Hardy continues with a warning: “It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways” (T 18). Not only is this a landscape better experienced from afar, but by highlighting some of its defects—bad weather, difficult roads, boggy terrain—Hardy “quickly chills the enthusiasm” of perspective visitors

(Shires, “Radical Aesthetic” 145) who may, he implies, find it a more difficult, less idyllic journey than anticipated. Yet, should the tourist persevere and make his way through those

“narrow, tortuous, and miry ways” “into its recesses”—which Hardy’s “as yet” implies is inevitable—he will not find the “beautiful…secluded…untrodden” paradise he has come for

(that untouched, pure, authentic rural), for in coming he will have inherently violated that which he desired to find—after all, as Kaja Silverman has argued, the “implicit precondition for preserving [the landscape] as a “virgin territory”” is the “absence” of those very tourists and artists (5). Like Tess, who can no longer stand as Angel’s idealized “daughter of Nature” once she is known to have been marked or inscribed by another, the Vale of Blackmore—and rural

England more generally—is only ideal insofar as it remains “untrodden,” unvisited, unrealized by those who idealize it, a fact which hints at the unreality of the ideal in the first place.

Ultimately, as with Under the Greenwood Tree’s beguiling “Come hither!”, Hardy’s guidebook- style introduction to Marlott and the Vale of Blackmore,262 mocks the reader’s delusive desire to

262 In The Literary Tourist Nicola Watson argues for an affinity between Hardy’s novels—particularly Tess—and the 244 realize the “pure” rural England of his imagination by suggesting that such a place only exists in imagination and inviting him to come out and discover as much for himself.

And yet, despite Hardy’s continued insistence that the rural world of art and literature is not, nor should be understood as a manual or map to the actual English countryside, that the two are not the same, his readers continually insisted, like Moule, on appropriating his work in such a manner. Indeed, even before Wessex took shape as a fully coherent geographical region in

Hardy’s works, readers were identifying it with the Dorset area of south-western England, a place Nicola Watson reminds us was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, “an agricultural backwater…with little claim to the picturesque and none to the sublime…[which] had to date attracted little tourist attention” (176). Hardy’s fiction, however, changed all that as enthusiastic critics began to encourage visits to the Dorset area on the grounds of its quintessential, idyllic English rurality:

That Mr. Hardy has taken his place in the true literature of England is to us beyond

question. For his sake and for their own we trust the larger public will recognize the fact,

and steep themselves in the fresh healthy air of Dorset, and come into contact with the

kindly folk who dwell there, through these pages, and then test their truth, as they can, in

summer visits to the wolds, hill-sides, and coasts, which their ‘native’ has described so

well. (British Quarterly Review, “Survey” 94)

Published in 1881, this unsigned critic’s advice to readers to visit Dorset in order to “steep themselves in the fresh healthy air of Dorset” and “test [the] truth” of Hardy’s stories, to find, that is, the authentic, restorative rural world they purportedly represent, suggests how easily guidebook; she claims: Hardy deploys the well-developed language of the guidebook, constructing a readerly position analogous to the stance, vantage-point and aesthetic of a tourist, melding landscape prospects with antiquarian information and “association” and geological or economic observations, architectural details and historical anecdote. Probably the most striking and developed instance of this is the description of the Vale of Blackmore in chapter two of Tess… (179)

245

Dorset’s prosaic, “unpicturesque” reality was overwritten or replaced by idyllic fantasies derived equal parts from Hardy’s fictions and his readers’ desires to realize those fictions.

Ten years (and six books) later, the London Bookman would publish “Thomas Hardy’s

Wessex,” an anonymous article which not only advocated such “summer visits” to Dorset, but offered a casual itinerary that enabled one to actually “follow the fortunes of the people of

[Hardy’s] fancy through their native Wessex”—to, that is, retrace the steps of Hardy’s characters and, in doing so, purportedly enter into the Wessex of the novels (Bookman). Indeed, the author, whom Watson identifies as Clive Holland, directs “wanderers” to begin in Bristol—a real-world location on the cusp of Wessex that Squire Dornell visits in “The First Countess of Wessex” from A Group of Noble Dames (1891)—and “follow the old squire on his way home…past the

Mendip Hills, in the direction of the town of Ivell (Yeovil)” (Bookman). Leaving the squire at

Falls Park (where he dies in his story), one continues on to the fictional village of “King’s

Hintock which,” Holland tells his readers, “you may possibly find in the neighbourhood of

Evershot…” (Bookman). Directing readers from the real world into the fictional world of the novels, Holland offers real-world equivalents to the fictional settings (as with “Ivell (Yeovil)”) or approximate real-world locations (as with King’s Hintock being “in the neighbourhood of

Evershot”), effectively suggesting that the fictional can be found within the real (Bookman). In addition to the written directions, Holland drew up a rough sketch map entitled “Thomas Hardy’s

Wessex” which was published alongside his article (see figure 4.2). Notable as the first known map of Hardy’s “merely realistic dream country” in which Wessex names are “fitted into the outline of south-western England and appear side by side with proper names such as Bristol and

Southampton” (Keith 82), Holland carefully places the real names in parenthesis under their 246 suggested fictional counterparts and includes actual roads and a scale to better aid his implied tourist in finding the desired destination(s).263

Although Hardy was dismissive of this map,264 Holland’s impulse to cartographically conflate Wessex with South-western England, to identify them as one and the same, proved popular with travellers and readers alike. Indeed, following the tremendous success of Tess,

Holland’s (and Hardy’s) implied tourist became a real tourist and, as the critics’ recommendations to visit this literary landscape were taken up by the first of the literary pilgrims in the 1890s, more such maps appeared—all attempting to accurately graft the Wessex of the novels onto England’s map. Such maps were frequently published alongside elaborate itineraries, like that of Annie MacDonell’s (included in her 1894 study of Hardy’s works), which, in addition to “an efficient map” included “practical suggestions for a tour of “the scenes of many of the stories,” radiating out from “Casterbridge” as a centre,” as well as “detailed instructions for following in the footsteps of Tess” and positioning oneself to see the landscape from the vantage point of many of Hardy’s characters (Watson 182-3). Alongside MacDonell’s directions are extended excerpts from the novels, reorganized by location, presumably so that the traveller can re-read all the descriptions of a particular location when in it and identify the details of the text in the landscape of the real—an exercise that further conflates fiction with reality. In addition to such maps and itineraries, an increasing number of images of Wessex began to

263 While modern Hardy readers are familiar with the idea of a map—a familiarity engendered by the map of “Hardy’s Wessex” now published in the front of each of his novels—Watson reminds us “how novel an idea it was in the 1890s to construct a map which purported to show the common setting for a number of novels” (182). In fact, she claims, “there is one precedent for a map of an ambiguously real and fictive place—the map of [Sir Walter Scott’s] The Lady of the Lake [1810]—but this confines itself to one text” (182). Notably, Hardy had drawn a sketch map of Egdon Heath as a frontispiece for the first edition of The Return of the Native (a professional etching was made of his sketch) (see figure 4.3). However, as Watson notes, this map was “entirely local, and entirely fictional” and being “neither topographically accurate, localisable, nor [conventionally] orientated,” it offered no way of identifying a real-world location (178).

264 In a letter to John Lane, who wrote to Hardy proposing to publish a map of Wessex in 1892, Hardy writes, “The Map of Wessex in the Bookman was not made by me. It seems to have been suggested by an observation of mine that I had begun one—I do not intend to finish mine at present; & hardly think it advisable for you to repeat what the Bookman has done” (Hardy Letters 1: 275). 247 surface, and in 1893 there was even “an exhibition of paintings of “Wessex scenes” in April at the Royal Academy” in London, which included works by the English landscape painter and

Dorset native, Frederick Whitehead (182). Hardy’s private response to this final example of the extra-textual manifestations of his creation is, as Watson points out, rather telling. After attending the exhibit he made the following entry in his journal: “At Academy Private View.

Find that there is a very good painting here of Woolbridge Manor-House under the (erroneous) title of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ ancestral home.’ Also one entitled ‘In Hardy’s Country, Egdon

Heath’” (LW 270). In her reading of this journal entry, Watson suggests that the “ambiguously mendacious “erroneous”” of Hardy’s response—since Hardy had in fact used Woolbridge

Manor-House as the basis for his description of Tess’s ancestral home—reveals an “anxiety regarding his control over his fictive territory,” a fear of losing control of his fictive domain to such “artists and tourists” (182). At the same time, we can read his dismissive, yet pointed, correction of the artist’s claim to have painted Tess’s ancestral home as simply another reminder that fiction is not the same as reality and that Tess, as a fictional character, does not, cannot, have an ancestral home outside the pages of her story.

All the same, these increasing attempts to locate the real referents of his “merely realistic dream country,” are something both Watson and Keith, among others, claim had a powerful influence on the editorial decisions Hardy made when preparing the first collected edition of his works, published by Osgood, McIlvaine in 1895 under the series title, “The Wessex Novels of

Thomas Hardy.” Indeed, it is in this edition, as Simon Gatrell has thoroughly documented, that

Hardy began to revise all of his works from the “common standpoint…of Thomas Hardy, delineator of Wessex,” meticulously placing each text “in the pattern of existence that Wessex had become for him” (Hardy the Creator 118). This textual remapping involved, for instance,

“converting the real place-names in Hardy’s [historical romance] The Trumpet Major (1880) to 248

“Wessex” names to match the other novels, harmonizing place-names in earlier novels such as

Desperate Remedies, and providing Wessex place-names for places or [topographic] features that had earlier been described in general terms” (Watson 184-5).265 The process of clarifying and standardizing the topographical details to make them more internally coherent was continued through the second collected edition of his works, published seventeen years later by Macmillan under the series title, “The Wessex Edition.” The prevalent critical consensus regarding the textual emendations of both collected editions is that they not only strengthen the internal coherence of Wessex but, in Gatrell’s words, work to achieve “a kind of photographic resemblance between [Hardy’s] fictional topography and that observable in south-western

England” (Vision of Wessex 174).266 Essentially, while producing a more cogent, coherent landscape for his novels, Hardy seems to make Wessex more readily identifiable with the

English landscape than it had previously been.

On the one hand, then, these revisions appear to simply be correcting and verifying the work of those Wessex enthusiasts who had sought for just this exactitude in their own attempts at locating the real Wessex. By presenting the public with a seemingly transparent one-to-one correspondence between his fictive landscape and England’s real one, Hardy produces the authoritative texts necessary to confirm and preserve his position as “Lord of the Wessex

Coast”—a title Rudyard Kipling had mockingly bestowed upon him in his 1890 poem, “The

Rhyme of the Three Captains.”267 On the other hand, however, the editorial apparatuses

265 Watson notes that because The Trumpet Major was historical fiction (Hardy’s first attempt at the genre) Hardy had initially followed Walter Scott’s well-established “practice of adopting existing place-names instead of pursuing the Wessex scheme already partially in place” in his other novels (178). For the most thorough catalog of Hardy’s textual revisions see Gatrell’s Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex.

266 For others who voice this view see, for instance, Haslam, Keith, Millgate, and Watson.

267 Kipling’s poem, first published in The Athenaenum in December 1890, is a ballad about a British vessel being stripped of her cargo by an American pirate ship that metaphorically expresses Kipling’s anger at the American publishers Harper and Brothers who printed his work without his permission, offering him a mere £10 honorarium as recompense, as well as his frustration with the “three great captains”—three leading British authors of the day— 249 produced for these two collected editions appear to do something very different than the in-text revisions and, when taken into account, seem instead to reassert Hardy’s “ambiguously mendacious” pronouncement of the “(erroneous)” nature of Whitehead’s claim to have painted

Tess’s ancestral home, effectively denying any easy, straightforward correspondence between

Wessex and south-western England. Consisting of authorial prefaces, maps, and frontispieces in two mediums (etchings and photographs), the paratexts of these editions appear, upon first glance, to be in accord with the revisions: merely amplifying the reification of Wessex by providing further information as to the real-world locations of its sights and locales. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes clear that these paratexts challenge the very correspondence the textual revisions seem to encourage, raising issues of authenticity by gesturing back not to the reality of the fiction, but to its essential fictiveness and, ultimately, to the fictiveness of the reality itself. Thus, rather than authenticating Hardy’s fictional landscape via topographical correspondence these editorial appendages frustrate and undermine all efforts to fully assimilate

Wessex with south-western England, essentially highlighting the fundamentally impenetrable, unreal nature of Hardy’s Wessex and the authentic rural England it had come to represent.

Originally written for the 1895 Osgood, McIlvaine collected edition, then revised, expanded via the addition of a postscript, or, in some cases, entirely rewritten for the 1912

Macmillan collected edition, the authorial prefaces are notoriously equivocal, infuriatingly evasive, acutely self-conscious, and frequently disingenuous in their statements about Hardy, the texts, and, most significantly for our purposes here, Wessex. Indeed, because Wessex was the central marketing concept for both editions, all of the prefaces devote at least some space to it, often focusing on the particular novel’s setting and its relation to the “real.” In some cases,

who failed to give him the support he expected in his complaint against the American publishing house. The other two “captains” are Sir Walter Besant and William Black, figured as “Master of the Thames from Limehouse to Blackwell” and “Admiral of the North from Solway Firth to Skye” respectively. 250

Wessex as a whole is discussed, as in the in the preface to Far From the Madding Crowd in which Hardy famously discusses the origins and popularity of his literary landscape in a characteristically oblique manner:268

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters

of “Far from the Madding Crowd”…that I first ventured to adopt the word “Wessex”

from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing

name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom. […] However, the press and

public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly joined me in the

anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living under Queen Victoria….

I did not anticipate that this application of the word to modern story would extend

outside the chapters of these particular chronicles. But it was soon taken up elsewhere….

Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and

landscapes of a partly real, partly dream-country, has become more and more popular as

a practical provincial definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a

utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from.

But I ask all good and idealistic readers to forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe

that there are any inhabitants of Victorian Wessex outside these volumes in which their

lives and conversations are detailed. (FMC 3-4, emphasis added)

Here, Hardy clearly emphasizes the “fanciful” unreality of his landscape—the fact that, while a term excavated from history, Wessex, as it appears in his works, is a fiction, one that only exists within the novels—and he explicitly asks his readers (at least those “good and idealistic” ones) to preserve it as such despite the popular inclination to do otherwise. And yet, immediately

268 The quotations here are from the 1912 preface, although the same pedigree was recorded in the 1895 preface; there are, however, a few differences between the prefaces—including Hardy’s substitution of the phrase “a merely realistic dream country,” used in the 1895 preface, for “a partly real, partly dream-country” in the 1912 rewrite. For details on the emendations made to all the prefaces, see Gatrell’s Hardy the Creator. 251 following this request, Hardy goes on to tease the reader with suggestions of Wessex’s extra- textual reality:

[T]he village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes of the present story…are for the

most part laid, would perhaps be hardly discernible by the explorer, without help, in any

existing place nowadays; though at the time, comparatively recent, at which this tale was

written a sufficient reality to meet the descriptions…might have been traced easily

enough. The church remains…unrestored and intact [to which he appends the footnote

“This is no longer the case” in the 1912 version], and a few of the old houses; but the

ancient malt-house…has been pulled down these twenty years; also most of the thatched

and dormered cottages…. The heroine’s fine old Jacobean house would be found in the

story to have taken a witch’s-ride of a mile or more from its actual position… (4)

As Watson notes, Hardy wryly implies that the novel’s locations “were there, but no longer exist or, if they do still exist, they are in the wrong place” (186), unable be found “without help.” Yet this help, presumably Hardy’s, was entirely unreliable, as seen in the 1912 postscript to The

Woodlanders’ 1895 preface when Hardy acknowledges his own inability to re-locate the “real spot” of some of his fictional locales:

I have been honoured by so many inquiries for the true name and exact locality of the

hamlet ‘Little Hintock,’…that I may as well confess here once and for all that I do not

know myself where the hamlet is…. To oblige readers I once spent several hours on a

bicycle with a friend in a serious attempt to discover the real spot; but the search ended in

failure; though tourists assure me positively that they have found it without trouble…

(TW 369)

Hardy’s concession to those tourists who believe they have “positively” found the “real spot” on which Little Hintock is based is implicitly undermined by his own inability to find it, despite 252 hours of searching, a failure that wryly hints at the hamlet’s lack of material existence. In a similar way, Hardy’s obsequious statement in the 1912 General Preface about “not contradict[ing] th[ose] keen hunters for the real” in their “discerning” identifications of “the originals,” is subtly undercut by his parenthetical disclaimer that “no detail is guaranteed,—that the portraiture of fictitiously named towns and villages was only suggested by certain real places, and wantonly wanders from inventorial descriptions of them” (47, emphasis added). Coyly mocking would-be-tourists—those “keen hunters for the real”—with his perpetual give and take in these prefaces (what Watson describes as the “double gesture of promise and reservation”

[185]), Hardy frustrates all efforts to locate the rural world of his novels within the present

English landscape, ensuring that their only genuine “reality” is the “reality” presented in his fictions.

The maps and frontispieces reproduce the give and take gestures of the prefaces, further thwarting attempts to conflate Wessex and the ideal of the rural with England as it was or is by visually destabilizing the relationship between the real and the imaginary. Each of the titles published in the 1895 edition and the 1912 edition contain a sketch map of Wessex that was printed in the back of the book. Simple and unadorned, the 1895 map is titled “The Wessex of the Novels,” while the elaborately decorated 1912 map is titled “Thomas Hardy’s Wessex”; both maps are modeled on sketches provided by Hardy, who drew from the first series of Ordnance

Survey maps of England’s counties as well as from the descriptions in his novels when preparing them. In his article on “Maps and Metaphors,” Simon Joyce has argued that illustrative maps

“support realism’s claim of a transparent relation between real and fictional space” “by acting like Flaubert’s mention of a barometer on the wall, which Roland Barthes argues in his essay on the “reality effect” contributes nothing except to declare that this is actual reality being described” (133). Indeed, Hardy himself made a similar point about literary maps when he 253 proposed to Smith, Elder that they use his sketch map of Egdon Heath as a frontispiece for the first edition of The Return of the Native: “a critic once remarked to me that nothing could give such reality to a tale as a map...& I myself have often felt the same thing” (Hardy Letters 1:

61).269

Hardy’s maps, however, deliberately trouble this “reality effect”: although the maps quite clearly depict the southwest region of England, complete with county boundaries and a readily identifiable coast line, the sparse 1895 map purposely excludes any place or topographic feature not mentioned in the novels, as if refusing to fully “orient or integrate Wessex with[in] the real”

(Watson 185) (see figure 4.4). Real places are marked only if they appear in the novels and short stories—so Bristol, Stonehenge, Blackmoor Vale, and a handful of others are included— otherwise only fictional (Wessex) places are labeled; significantly, there is no effort to provide any real world equivalents for the Wessex names as Holland had done on his map in 1890. The result is a fairly sparse, “uncluttered” map in which “The Wessex of the Novels” dominates the region [of England] covered by the map” (Pite, Hardy’s Geography 172). In addition to eliminating most of England’s actual topography and replacing it with Hardy’s literary landscape, this map omits a number of “features common to current guidebook maps—most especially road and rail routes” (Watson 185). Such omissions emphasize Wessex’s detachment from the easily traversed landscape of modern England and suggest its fundamental inaccessibility to/by the outside world: indeed, not only is there no road or rail line by which to enter (or exit) Wessex but, were one to find oneself there, there is no discernable way to travel from one point to the next.270 In many ways, Hardy’s 1895 map can, as Watson provocatively

269 For details on this map, see footnote 262.

270 Interestingly, as Ralph Pite notes, Hardy generally avoids overlapping the specific locations of one novel with those of another, thus while all are in Wessex, each still has its own particular geography (Hardy’s Geography 172- 3), a fact that further suggests the impossibility of travel between the sites—except in one’s imagination, of course.

254 contends, “be construed as an elaborate epistemological joke; [for] while an ordinary map is designed to refer in the abstract to a verifiable reality, [Hardy’s] map of fictional locations is verifiable not by reference to the physical locations themselves but only by reference back to the novels” (185). Indeed, the title itself emphasizes this fact for it is “The Wessex of the Novels” that has been mapped. That Hardy’s map points back to his novels as the primary referents through which to understand Wessex highlights the fact that those who came to Dorset in search of Wessex—and of the authentic rural England they associated with Wessex—were viewing the landscape as meaningful merely because of the fiction; in other words, the landscape assumed a meaningful reality only through the lens of Hardy’s fiction.

The 1912 map takes this “joke” a step further, deploying obsolete mapping conventions such as miniature houses and churches to mark places, such as those used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century county maps, and romantic adornments like an ornate compass and stylized scrolling around the title, such as those used in decorative (rather than practical) maps, in such a manner as to enhance the fictiveness of the landscape (see figure 4.5).271 Yet, because the

Wessex outline is once again so clearly that of south-western England, it is unclear which landscape is shown as being more imaginary: that of Wessex or England. Hardy’s choice of typography for this map further unsettles the conventional relationship between the real and the fictional where the latter is assumed to emerge from and be rooted in the former. As Ralph Pite points out, for the 1912 map Hardy uses the same font styles as those used on the first series of

England’s Ordnance Survey maps; these maps used lower-case italics to mark natural sites

(forests, rivers) and either an upright old text or italic capitals to mark social areas (villages, towns) (Hardy’s Geography 174). However, on the 1912 map of Wessex Hardy uses lower-case

271 Hardy sent his own sketch map to Macmillan and included the following thoughts in the accompanying letter: “My idea was that it could be copied on thin paper, either the same size or somewhat reduced, & folded in the volumes. If it were taken in hand by an artist he could put ships & fishes in the sea, & trees & animals in the forests & moors, as in old maps by Speed, &c. to give it a more finished appearance. But of course, as far as utility is concerned, it could be reproduced as it stands” (Hardy Letters 4: 184-5). 255

“flamboyant italics” for the fictitious place names (such as Mellstock, Weatherbury, Little

Hintock), and an “upright old text” for the real place names (such as Stonehenge, Bath, and

Bristol) that appear in his novels (174). While using separate fonts for the real and the fictional locations ensures that “fiction and reality stand…clearly apart” on Hardy’s map, as Pite argues, by marking the fictional place names in the same lettering that the Ordnance Survey maps used to mark natural sites (lower-case italics) and the real place names in the lettering used to mark the social sites (upright old text), Hardy implicitly naturalizes his fictional locales while simultaneously emphasizing the constructedness of the real places, a decision that suggests that

“the real has no natural authority,” no precedence, “over the fictitious” (174). At the same time, because the imaginary counties of Wessex are marked in embellished italic capitals (such as those used to mark towns on the Ordnance Survey maps), Hardy also gestures toward the constructedness of his landscape on the whole—something the map’s title, “Thomas Hardy’s

Wessex,” also points towards with its emphasis on the novelist’s creation of—and dominion over—the land mapped beneath it. Thus, while there might be something natural—something genuine, authentic, and real—at the heart of the rural landscape, this map suggests that it is contained within the broader fictions of Wessex and England, neither of which seems to be any more real than the other. This novel relationship between the real and the imaginary is perpetuated further by the fact that the first series of Ordnance Survey maps were in the process of being replaced in the 1890s, thus Hardy’s use of their lettering conventions on his own map is both archaic and ironic: ultimately neither fact nor fiction appear to be any closer to

“contemporary normality”—or contemporary reality—than the other (174). In the end, then, although both maps initially appear to offer to locate the real Wessex (or rather, locate Wessex in the real) for Hardy’s readers, neither ultimately do so. Instead, both jumble the real and the imaginary together so thoroughly as to produce what would be an utterly useless map for any 256 visitor to either Wessex or southwest England—a fact that only further emphasizes their equally impenetrable nature and imaginary status.

Like the prefaces and maps, the frontispieces of the 1895 and 1912 editions foster a relationship between the real and the imagined only to undermine the real’s claim to any sort of primacy or authority. Although many of Hardy’s novels were accompanied by illustrations when they were serialized in magazines, the 1895 edition marks the first time the landscape is made the focus of such illustrations.272 Henry Macbeth-Raeburn, under the guidance of Hardy,273 etched a landscape or setting for each novel; when the images were printed, each was accompanied by a note appended to the letterpress description of the scene that identified what location from the story it was (e.g., “Mellstock Church” or “Egdon Heath”), stating that the image was “Drawn on the spot” (see figure 4.6). For the frontispieces for the 1912 edition this topographical precision was taken a step further by Hardy’s decision to use photographs by his friend, Hermann Lea.

Like the sketches, these photographs are of landscapes and settings, the locations of which were again selected under the guidance of Hardy (see figure 4.7). While new for Hardy, photographic illustration was not a new concept with regard to his Wessex landscape; in fact, photographs associated with Hardy’s Wessex had been appearing since 1901 when the Bookman (the same magazine that had published Holland’s map of Wessex eleven years earlier) published a series of

Dorset images labeled (erroneously, we might imagine Hardy adding) as images of Wessex. The

272 The only exception to this being the sketch map of Egdon Heath that Hardy had prepared for the frontispiece in the first edition of The Return of the Native; for details, see footnote 263 and figure 4.3.

273 Gatrell describes the thoroughness of Hardy’s involvement in these illustrations in Hardy the Creator: For the Osgood, McIlvaine edition it was decided…by Hardy, that the frontispieces should be purely landscape drawings, and he directly involved himself in the choice of scene to be illustrated, more or less setting up Macbeth Raeburn’s stool and saying, “there before you is what I had in mind when I wrote of Rainbarrow, draw that,” or else giving him fairly detailed directions as to what was the appropriate landscape to take. (137)

257

1912 shift from etching to photography has been read by Simon Gatrell and others274 as an example of Hardy’s efforts to increase the photographic resemblance between his imagined topography and England’s actual topography, of, that is, his desire to conflate Wessex with

England. While this reading seems quite plausible, Hardy again refuses such an easy correspondence between the imagined and the real by electing to have the chosen images be of the same scene for each novel in both editions—only Tess of the d’Urberville’s frontispiece is changed from an image of Wellbridge-Manor House, to an image of Froom Meadow (perhaps because of Hardy’s aforementioned frustration about this identification of Tess’s ancestral home by Whitehead). Hardy’s decision to recycle the images, repackaging them in a new form, is a decision that further troubles the hierarchy between the real and the fictive by establishing a direct relationship between the sketch and the photograph in which the latter always refers to the former even as it refers to the actual site it reproduces. By having the exact copy (the photograph)—what could be understood as the “real” England—perpetually allude to an artistic rendition of that reality (the sketch), Hardy ensures that the artist’s imagined landscape is always at the heart of the real.

The decision to use photographs also challenges the very existence of the “real” England they claim to capture for, as Barthes reminds us in Camera Lucida, a photograph is only the memorial or relic of the person or scene preserved in the image. Elaborating on this elusiveness,

Armstrong writes that “[t]o look at a photograph is to know that the figure and ground within the image no longer exist outside its frame. At least, they no longer are as they were at the moment when the image was taken, for at that moment object and image parted ways and pursued entirely different histories” (“Emily’s Ghost” 245-6). Thus, even while seeming to verify the “reality” of

274 Gatrell’s central argument in both Hardy the Creator and Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex is that Hardy’s revisions reveal his growing desire to preserve the landscape of his childhood and so work to foster the one-to-one correspondence text and reality: the photographs are thus the culmination of these efforts. 258

Wessex in England, as England, these images hint that the England Wessex represents is no longer there for the finding—indeed, that it only exists in or as a representation. And these representations were, of course, mass produced, printed into every copy of Hardy’s novels and distributed throughout Great Britain, effectively “substituting,” as Walter Benjamin would say,

“a plurality of copies for a unique existence,” further undermining the authenticity of the real

(1169). Ultimately then, the photographic frontispieces—like the maps, prefaces, and texts themselves—suggest that both England and Wessex exist only in the realm of representation, of imagination.

Together, the 1895 and 1912 collected editions, with their revisions and editorial apparatuses, bring to full maturity the idea of “Wessex” and demonstrate the most elaborate aesthetic distortion of Hardy’s career. More—and less—than simply an imaginative representation of Dorset and its regions, Hardy’s Wessex disassembles the reality of the

“authentic” England it had come to represent in the popular imagination by simultaneously facilitating and inhibiting topographical identifications between the imagined and the real.

Although his textual revisions encouraged increasing numbers of those persistent hunters of the real to embark on journeys to the southwest of England, Hardy’s prefaces, maps, and illustrations remind us of how utterly unsuccessful these pilgrims must have been in their efforts to find it because, as Hardy hints, the imagined geography of novel or nation is ultimately more fiction than fact.

V. Ginning Jude: Jude the Obscure and the Iron Teeth of Wessex

While at work on his revisions for the Osgoode, McIlvaine collected edition of his works—the edition which, as Gatrell has convincingly argued, does more than any other publication to confirm the centrality of Wessex to Hardy’s creative vision, even as it works to 259 assert the fictionality of that centre, as I have argued275—Hardy was also at work on both the serial and volume editions of what would be his last, most controversial novel, Jude the

Obscure.276 As his “deliberate farewell to novel-writing” (Wright, His Readers 188),277 Jude is also, as Dennis Taylor reminds us, Hardy’s “final novelistic meditation on the nature of the world of Wessex” (“English National Identity” 346), making it a fitting text with which to conclude this chapter’s critical meditation on that world. Hardy’s was not, however, a tranquil meditation; indeed, this ferocious and brutal valediction—which, as Aaron Matz argues, amounts to an “absolute assault” on its readers in its relentless, excruciating depiction of Jude (and Sue’s) suffering (535) and its uncompromising indictment of Victorian values—is, I would like to argue, also Hardy’s infuriated tolling of his own metaphoric death knell—a raising, as it were, of

275 While I agree with Gatrell’s basic claim, I interpret this centrality differently: where Gatrell argues that Hardy’s goal was to increase the one-to-one correspondence between Wessex and southwestern England and thus preserve the traditions and culture of the rapidly changing rural world of his youth, I read these emendations and revisions much as I read the ostensibly innocuous and deferential aesthetic decisions in Under the Greenwood Tree—as a critique inserted sideways intended to expose the fundamental unreality of the rural world his readers so eagerly sought.

276 First published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine from December 1894 to November 1895, the serial version of Jude—which initially appeared under the title The Simpletons, then Hearts Insurgent—was so thoroughly bowdlerized as to make it virtually incommensurable with the single-volume edition issued by Osgoode, McIvaine as part of the Wessex Novels series in 1895. In Robert Slack’s terms, the serial version was “so watered down…that the anti-Victorian elements in the story were almost all washed away” (qtd. in Wright, His Readers 191). This practice of diluting—mutilating—his work for publication gestures back to the very beginnings of his career and to what he had been doing to his texts ever since the manuscript for “The Poor Man and the Lady” was rejected; however, unlike his previous works, when Hardy “watered down” Jude for its appearance in Harper’s he knew the “original,” undiluted work would also be published, thereby ensuring that the novel he intended to write would be the novel the majority of his readers consumed (LW 286). And, consume it they did: sales of the volume edition were higher than for any of Hardy’s previous works with more than 20,000 copies sold in the first three months of its publication (Cox xxviii). This number was likely fuelled by “the storm of controversy” (xxxii) that surrounded the novel for, although a number of admiring reviews appeared, the “howls” against it (to borrow Hardy’s term) were far louder (LW 287). For detailed descriptions of the differences between the serial and volume editions as see Dennis Taylor’s Note on the History of the Text in the Penguin edition of the novel, Dale Kramer’s essay, “Hardy and Readers: Jude the Obscure” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, and Wright’s chapter on Jude in Hardy and His Readers. For discussions of the controversy surrounding its reception see, in addition to the works just listed, Hardy’s Life and Work, Cox’s Introduction to the Critical Heritage, and Dawn Sova’s Banned Books.

277 Although both the “Postscript” to the Wessex Edition of the novel and the Life “places the decision to abandon fiction after the critical “misrepresentations” from which Jude suffered” the decision to do so “probably preceded its composition,” writes Wright with reference to Millgate (His Readers 188). Indeed, given the radical nature of the text, it seems more than likely, as Dale Kramer writes, that “Hardy dedicated himself to Jude with the idea that this would be his last novel, and with every intention of having his full say in defiance of the convention-ridden reviewers” and readers whom he had censored himself for throughout his career (165).

260 his own black flag of objectification and abstraction—as he confronts the public’s insistent idealization and misreading of his work, his landscape, rural England, and, finally, of himself as he becomes the “historian of Wessex,” a national figure around whom the idyllised fictions of the rural coalesced to the point of indivisibility.

In effectively “becoming his landscape,” as Linda Shires so aptly phrases the process by which Hardy became conflated with his creation (“Author as Spectacle” 208), Hardy also becomes, by metonymic extension, the embodiment of the diluted, idealized, imaginary image of rural England that he had written against for almost thirty years. Accordingly, we see Hardy canonized as “the good little Thomas Hardy” (James qtd. in Williams, Country 199),278 that earthy, uncultured rustic from “Upper Boghamption” (qtd. in Millgate, Public Voice 163)279 who is himself diluted, idealized, and imagined in a manner palatable for public consumption and then placed at the centre of England’s national culture. In becoming such, Hardy, like Tess, effectively loses his individuality—his margin—for he becomes bound to and determined by the very landscape he created: “He was by birth and upbringing a countryman; and he remained one,” wrote Lord David Cecil in his 1942 study of the author, “his long life was spent almost entirely within a few miles of his birthplace. This fact conditioned his imaginative development and coloured his creative process, which was to operate at full power only in the context of the region which he called Wessex” (“Hardy the Historian” 154).280 Blatantly ignoring Hardy’s time

278 Describing the “tone of social patronage” that infuses descriptions such as Henry James’s (“good little Thomas Hardy”) and Somerset Maugham’s (“I remember a little man with an earthy face…he had…a strange look of the soil”), Raymond Williams writes of how Hardy was perceived by critics and contemporaries as being one of the “Wessex peasants” his works delineate (Country 199-200).

279 The mis-identification of Hardy’s birthplace (as Upper Boghamption rather than Upper Bockhamption) in the 1895 Chambers’ Encyclopedia entry on him was, as Millgate notes, “a source of particular irritation” to Hardy as it seemed to contribute to such backwater characterizations of him (Public Voice 163).

280 Not all critics were as “admiring” of Hardy’s ruralism as Cecil—however, all agree that it is the defining feature of the author; for instance, after meeting Hardy at a dinner party in London, George Gissing wrote of him, “Born a peasant, he yet retains much of the peasant’s views of life…sadly he needs a larger outlook on upon life—a wider culture” (qtd. in Ferguson 14). 261 in London where he spent many seasons, often keeping a house of his own, his time abroad in

Europe, where he travelled with Emma on a number of occasions, as well as any literary production not having to do with rural England, Cecil’s somewhat condescending celebration of

Hardy’s essential ruralism reduces and restricts the scope of Hardy’s art, life, and identity to “a few miles” of rural England. Although Cecil’s remarks appear almost half a century after

Hardy’s turn from novel-writing to poetry and nearly two decades after Hardy’s official biography was published,281 they are simply a continuation of a way of seeing Hardy that, as

Hardy was keenly aware, had been happening his entire novel-writing career—and continues to happen today. For instance, Sara Haslam, in her 2009 essay on “Wessex, Literary Pilgrims, and

Thomas Hardy,” uses the notion of the “territorial imperative”—“the ways in which the geographical characteristics of an area may “bind and determine the nature” of those who grow up there”—in relation to Hardy who, she claims, “exhibit[s] symptoms of being bound and determined by place” (165). That said, although Haslam’s reading conflates Hardy with

Wessex/rural England just as thoroughly as Cecil’s had, it also suggests that Hardy may have become a “victim” to it as his readers started using his literary landscape as a guide to his real life (164). In Jude, however, Hardy cries out from within this rural prison, vividly revealing the rural landscape that would become both his legacy and his identity to be an aesthetic, ideological, and geographic trap from which there is no escape—for either his hero or himself.

References to traps abound in Jude, most frequently in reference to Arabella and marriage; however, in the middle of the novel, Jude encounters a more literal trap, common to the rural landscape and central to my understanding of the novel. Having returned to Marygreen for his aunt’s funeral, Jude is roused from sleep by the “shrill squeak” of a rabbit caught in a gin-

281 For details about Hardy’s official biography, see footnote 221 above. 262 trap outside his bedroom window (JO 205). A sound “familiar” from his rural childhood, Jude is unable to avoid “pictur[ing]” the “agonies of the rabbit”:

If it were a ‘bad catch’ by the hind-leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing six hours

till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak-

springed instrument enable it to escape, it would die in the fields from the mortification

of the limb. If it were a ‘good catch,’ namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken,

and the limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an impossible escape. (205)

As Jude well knows, once trapped, the rabbit is doomed regardless of whether the gin-trap is weak-springed or not, the catch good or bad. Even more brutal, perhaps, is the fact that the animal, unconscious of its fate and caught in the agonies of its present, persistently fights to escape, intensifying its suffering and maiming itself further in its struggle for what is an impossible liberty. The scene (along with the rabbit’s suffering) finally—mercifully—ends when

Jude, unable to bear the thought of the creature’s pain any longer, goes outside and snaps its neck. While the vivid, unflinching description of the rabbit’s agony and fate functions as evidence of the novel’s radical, relentless naturalism—of the “brutal facts of real life” with which it confronts its readers (Matz 524)—the scene also functions as a powerful metonymic expression of the grotesque reality that governs the novel as a whole. More specifically, the rabbit’s excruciating-yet-pointless struggle for freedom from the barbaric, man-made mechanism that imprisons it offers a striking parallel to Jude’s own vain struggle as he fights to liberate himself from the stifling complex of personal, social, historical, aesthetic, and ideological values that ensnare him. And, like the rabbit, he is trapped without either recognizing or accepting how impossible escape truly is for, as a “native” of rural England, of Wessex, it is not only the powerful constraints of religion, class, sexual desire, biological determinism, social laws, or even narrative convention that hold him captive. It is also the very landscape he exists within—the 263

“partly-real, partly-dream country” of Wessex, of rural England, so well-beloved by Hardy’s readers past and present—that traps Jude in its “iron teeth,” holding him in agony until he finally expires, exhausted and broken by his struggle.

Hardy emphasizes Jude’s imprisonment in the landscape in a number of different ways.

Already mentioned is Arabella’s association with traps, and her relationship with Jude is repeatedly described as one of entrapment: “That’s the story about me in Marygreen, is it—that I entrapped ‘ee? Much of a catch you were, Lord send!” Arabella says to Jude shortly after their marriage (JO 63), while Sue later worries that Arabella will “entrap [Jude]…as she did before” were Jude to visit her (254). That Arabella is also the character most overtly associated with the rural landscape, with her dun colouring, her earthy sensuality, and her uninhibited animality, and that it is this rustic earthliness that “traps” Jude (attracting him and making him aware of and subject to his own earthliness), creates an implicit link between Jude’s entrapment and the landscape. Notably, Arabella’s artificiality—her sucked in dimples and pinned on hair—does not negate the link between her and the rural landscape, but rather intensifies it since, as this chapter has thoroughly shown, the Wessex landscape is itself inherently artificial.

While Arabella may be the most vivid personification of the man-made landscape that imprisons Jude, it is the novel as a whole that reveals how impossible his escape from it truly is; indeed, Hardy structures the entire novel—which is to say, Jude’s entire existence—around

Jude’s relationship to geography by dividing the novel in to six parts, “each centered on the scene of action, the place where Jude finds himself: “At Marygreen;” “At Christminster;” “At

Melchester;” “At Shaston;” “At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere”; “At Christminster Again”” (Matz

526).282 These place-oriented sections essentially plot Jude’s life, binding his narrative to the

282 Notably, although the novel opens with an eleven-year-old Jude living in Marygreen, a small “ugly” village in North Wessex (JO 8), we are told that he spent his first ten years in Mellstock, the seemingly idyllic heart of Hardy’s literary landscape (where, we will recall, his first success, Under the Greenwood Tree, takes place). This 264 landscape. Of course, even as each part focuses on Jude’s time in—or rather, “at”—a particular place (or, in the fifth section, at a series of undifferentiated places encapsulated under the vague appellation of “Elsewhere”283), each also draws our attention to Jude’s movement between places as he travels from Marygreen to Christminster, from Christminster to Melchester, and so forth: in fact, each section begins and/or ends with Jude on the move making it clear he is never “at” any one place for long. While we could read this chronic movement as a sign of Jude’s fundamental alienation from the landscape,284 it is rationalized by his early determination “to move onward through good and ill” (JO 68)—to, that is, move to Christminster in order to pursue his dreams of studying at Christminster University—a determination that fuses Jude’s physical movement to his social, intellectual, and economic aspirations. In other words, moving “onward” in the landscape becomes a means of progressing forward, of moving upward in life285—a novelistic convention that Alex Moffett reminds us is common to the nineteenth-century bildungsroman

(86).286

detail suggests that, even though most of the novel takes place in North Wessex, along the “outer fringes of the region presented on Hardy’s map” (Pite, Hardy’s Geography 178), it is Wessex as a whole that binds and determines—that traps—Jude.

283 John Goode has famously read the vagueness of “Elsewhere” as a sign of how arbitrary places become in Jude as Sue and Jude are compelled by economic necessity to move from place to place: “the arbitrariness is vital: they both have to go to these places and these places have no meaning for them” (Offensive Truth 141). Although the specific places become arbitrary to Jude (and Sue)—a reflection, Pite suggests, on the superficiality, the meaninglessness of the topographical exactness desired by Hardy’s readers (Hardy’s Geography 180)—they remain meaningful in that they continue to demonstrate how Jude’s life is bound to/structured by his relation to Wessex’s geography.

284 A reading numerous scholars have convincingly performed, including Goode, Gatrell, Fisher, and Pite.

285 In her article on space and time in Jude the Obscure, “Highways and Cornfields,” Janet Freeman goes so far as to connect Jude’s chronic movement to life itself: “Motion is like breathing in Jude the Obscure: it is both a sign of life and a sign of what life is like. As long as he lives, Jude Fawley never stops moving from place to place” (161).

286 Moffett writes: “the nineteenth-century European Bildungsroman is conventionally defined as a novel of development—one in which the protagonist journeys both geographically and experientially towards a desired social position” (86.) Accordingly, even when his dream of studying at Christminster University is abandoned, Jude’s pursuit of happiness and success remains bound to the practice of moving “onward” as he and Sue continue to move through the landscape in search of both. Such a reading does not, of course, negate the more common reading of Jude’s constant movement as a sign of his alienation; instead, it suggests that the pursuit of success as defined in this world—and perhaps such success itself—may be bound to alienation.

265

And yet, although Jude is constantly on the move, his is rather pointedly not a journey or life of advancement. In spite of his plan “to move onward through good and ill,” it is always (and already) on the “too familiar road” that he finds himself traveling—both personally and geographically (JO 67, emphasis added); were we to trace Jude’s travels on a map of Wessex, we would see that, while a lot of ground is covered, it is, more often than not, the same ground being covered again and again and again. Moreover, as Jude circles the landscape, returning to places he has already been, retreading paths he has already walked, he also finds himself reencountering people he has already met, reenacting choices and mistakes that have already been made, rebuilding structures that have already been built, rewriting words that have already been written, even repeating words that have already been said.287 Thus, despite thinking of himself and Sue as

“pioneers,” Jude is unable to forge any new paths—is unable to “move onward”—in this world

(341); instead, the entire novel reverberates with echoes of itself—of Jude’s past, of his parent’s past, of the landscape’s past, of England’s past—resulting in “the most claustrophobic atmosphere of any of Hardy’s texts” (Prentiss180) as each return, each repetition, each reencounter serves as an increasingly oppressive reminder to both Jude and the reader of how little Jude has progressed. Rather than moving onward, progressing forward then, Jude remains

“trapped” in what Norman Prentiss describes as “a cycle of repetition” (181) that becomes “a form of torture” (182) as he struggles—and fails—to escape the Wessex landscape that he travels through and the rural, working-class identity it has bequeathed him.

Jude’s failure to advance (personally, geographically) has led critics to read Jude “as either a parody or a mutation of the Bildungsroman” (Moffett 86), one in which the Victorian,

287 There are countless studies of the patterns and repetitions that structure Jude, many of them very insightful; however, the most influential discussion of Hardy’s use of repetition remains J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of it in Tess and The Well-Beloved in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. For Miller, both these novels demonstrate the impossibility of escaping patterns of repetition, which he sees as internally rather than externally imposed; my own reading sees such patterns as imposed by both internal and external forces but no more the escapable for it.

266 middle-class narrative of personal, social, and national progress is interrogated, undermined, and discarded. And indeed, although Jude follows a conventional chronology, beginning with Jude’s childhood and ending with his death, “[t]he structure of the book is,” as Prentiss elegantly suggests, “like the well young Jude looks into in the first chapter—“a long circular perspective””

(181)—repetitive and enclosed. Disrupting the bildungsroman’s narrative of progress is, therefore, the novel’s representation of space;288 it is unsurprising then that, as a child, Jude registers the limits of (his) life spatially:

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its

circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of

shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish,

rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and

warped it.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man. (JO

12)

Moving from the circumference to the centre of “your time,” your life, means moving from a position in which it seems the world is entirely in front of you to one in which you realize that the world actually surrounds you, imprisons you, and that it does so while exerting a pressure

(social, ideological, atmospheric) that shakes and warps you, binding and determining you.

Jude’s desire not to grow up, not to develop or progress—a desire so grotesquely enacted later in the novel by Jude’s son, pointedly also named Jude—thus emerges out of a growing awareness

288 For a thoughtful discussion of the novel’s “pervasive refiguring of temporality in spatial terms,” see Forest Pyle’s “Demands of History: Narrative Crisis in Jude the Obscure” (362). However, where Pyle reads this spatialization as an attempt to recover “that which remains lost or impoverished in the story” (363)—community, tradition, meaning—my own sense is that it is about demonstrating the material reality, the presence, of the historical and ideological forces that bear down on and imprison Jude; while space is certainly a repository of history in Wessex, with “every inch of ground [having been] the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickering, weariness” (JO 8), this history overwhelms Jude, who is unable to escape it.

267 of how just how circumscribed, how bounded his development and his life are by the world around him.

The first official map of Wessex, drawn even as Jude was being written, offers further evidence of Jude’s geographically bounded life for, in it, Wessex is graphically closed off from the rest of England via its firmly demarcated boundaries, drawn in solid black ink and published inside every copy of the Wessex Novels (see figure 4.3).289 Prior to this map, Wessex had been geographically and cartographically unbounded; while the plots of each of the novels focus on particular places within Wessex and are, therefore, limited to those places, the fictional county as a whole was left open, expansive, full of unplotted possibilities. The effect of this openness can be seen in the early sketch map of Egdon Heath that Hardy provided for the frontispiece of the first edition of The Return of the Native: here the map of the “Scene of the Story” (which, as mentioned above, is in no discernable way connected to the map of England) fills the page while its landscape and roads run off the page, together suggesting this world continues to extend indefinitely (see figure 4.2).290 Once the official map was plotted and printed, however, Wessex became fused with—limited to and determined by—the map of England. At the same time, as the black boundary line between Wessex and the rest of England suggests, it also became sectioned off from the rest of England, making it an enclosure within which its inhabitants are contained.291

That Hardy, while designing this map, chose to locate Christminster, Jude’s longed-for city of light, the site of his hopes and dreams, just outside of Wessex—indeed, “within hail of the

Wessex border…almost with one small toe within it” (JO 72, emphasis added)—suggests a

289 The boundary line between Wessex and the rest of England is even more pronounced in the map designed for the 1912 Wessex Edition of the novels (see figure 4.5).

290 For a discussion of this map, see footnote 262.

291 This reading of Wessex as a formally bounded space accords with Gatrell’s sense that Hardy’s decision to map and unify Wessex for the Wessex Novels Edition marks the “closure of Wessex as a living culture” for Hardy (“Wessex” 32). 268 deliberate emphasis on the division between inside and out, between Wessex and the world beyond—a world to which Christminster appears the singular gateway. (Christminster is, notably, the northern most point on the map of Wessex; the world above—what’s shown of it, anyway—has been left blank, unmapped as if to suggest the possibilities and freedom to be found there.) To get out of Wessex, out of the rural, working-class identity it has bequeathed him, Jude imagines he must “move onward,” upward to Christminster; more specifically, he must get into Christminster University. But this is a threshold Jude will never cross, for the boundaries that have been drawn on the map are reinforced, redrawn, by the wall that literally and metaphorically divides Jude from the university and from the life, the world it represents:

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of his enthusiasm,

that Jude perceived how far away from the object of that enthusiasm he really was. Only

a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a

common mental life….Only a wall—but what a wall!

…[H]e was as far from them as if he had been at the antipodes. Of course he was.

He was a young workman in a white blouse, and with stone-dust in the creases of his

clothes; and in passing him they did not even see him, or hear him, rather saw through

him as through a pane of glass at their familiars beyond. Whatever they were to him, he

to them was not on the spot at all; and yet he had fancied he would be close to their lives

by coming there.

But the future lay ahead after all.…For the present he was outside the gates of

everything, colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside. (80-1)

Here, although he has physically made it to the “spot of his enthusiasm,” Jude realizes he is no closer to getting in to Christminster University than if he had been at Marygreen—or anywhere else for that matter for, as Forest Pyle notes, “the obstacles of class are compressed into the form 269 of spatial separation” (“Demands of History” 370). Despite being physically outside of Wessex in this moment, Jude remains trapped in its ideological strictures and, caked in the dust of his work, his class, his world, he is invisible to this other world—so much so that it is as if he is not there at all (“he to them was not on the spot at all”). It is unsurprising then, that after his inability to “make himself seen or heard” in Christminster (JO 73), Jude “turn[s] his back upon the city that had been such a thorn in his side, and [strikes] southward” back “into Wessex” (117).

In ““Outside the Gates of Everything”: Hardy’s Exclusionary Realism,” Audrey Jaffe reads Jude’s encounter with Christminster’s wall as an example of what she terms “realism’s exclusionary potential,” of, that is, realism’s potential to not reflect or interpellate its subject

(here, Jude) in its landscape and to instead, “keep him out,” exclude him: “The realist landscape,” writes Jaffe, “knowing how to give the subject (or native) what he wants (the return of his image), also knows how to refuse it” (384). Jaffe’s interest in such exclusionary potential

(and Hardy’s deployment of it) is in how it “articulates the real…as bounded,” as a limited and limiting space; for, although realism’s exclusionary potential reveals “the fantasmatic dimension of the idea of inclusion”—that to be reflected (and thus included) in the landscape is itself a fantasy—it also “reveals the mechanics of those representational norms that, in realist fiction and the world outside it, unobtrusively bind characters and readers to the places they inhabit”—in other words, that our realist fantasies of being reflected (included) in particular places (our home, our town, our country) bind us to those places (384). Although Jude is unable to see himself reflected in Christminster (the free indirect discourse of the wall-scene tells us that it is his perception of the wall/world that we are reading), he sees himself and his history everywhere in the Wessex landscape, as when, for instance, he notices his footprints on the spot where he and

Arabella first kissed, his youthful inscription on the milestone marking on the road to

Christminster, the house where he and Arabella lived when married, and even his parents’ 270 parting place near the Brown House. Collectively, these moments of reflection and inscription suggest that he is, at least in part, responsible for creating the walls that keep him out and the landscape the keeps him in—after all, it is he who writes himself into and onto the Wessex landscape. On many levels then, “the wall that separates Jude from his contemporaries turns out to be Jude himself” as Jaffe suggests (383). Hardy literalizes this responsibility by having Jude work as a stonemason, “mean[ing]” Pite writes, “that he shores up the walls which exclude him”

(Hardy’s Geography 185). In other words, Jude has so fully internalized the boundaries of place, of class, of identity that he has trapped himself within them; thus, although Jude “is often spoken of as leaving Wessex behind because the Dorset settings which dominate his other novels barely figure” as Pite points out (178), Jude’s is a story, a life, that very clearly cannot leave Wessex behind, and therein lies its tragedy.

And its irony. Reading Jude as a satire of circumstance rather than a tragedy, Aaron Matz argues that “[i]n Hardy’s staging of circumstance” (“Hardy’s vision of “circumstance”” being “a position we find ourselves in, a scenario of the self in relation to its surroundings”), “satire is what happens when a person becomes aware of his own tragedy” (526-7). Jude’s vague sense of himself as the subject of satire, what Matz describes as his “paranoid sense of victimhood” (519), is therefore bound to his awareness of his “tragic” circumstances, of his being bounded by and imprisoned in Wessex—in, that is, a man-made (self-made, society-made) trap from which there is no escape. Yet this awareness—and the tragedy and satire that accompanies it—does not belong to Jude alone. In addition to being an indictment of Victorian society and the narratives that govern it, Jude is, I believe, Hardy’s furious awareness of his own satire of circumstance:

Jude’s recognition of being trapped in Wessex speaks to Hardy’s own recognition of his imprisonment within the literary landscape he had constructed. More explicitly, Jude’s entrapment in Wessex satirizes Hardy’s subordination to the popular reception and idealization 271 of his imaginary geography. “The letter killeth,” Jude tells Sue at their final meeting, unknowingly echoing Hardy’s epigraph to the novel itself and giving voice to his author’s cry against the fictions that bind both him and his creations (JO 376).

Although Hardy would publically deny any connection between Jude and himself, claiming, “no book he had ever written contained less of his own life” (LW 289), this statement, like so many others about himself and his works, is disingenuous. While certainly not an autobiography, Jude does contain numerous personal associations, “inserted sideways” as it were, from Jude Fawley’s last name, which was the name of the village Hardy’s grandmother (on his father’s side) was from and which Pite notes is the “well-known” basis of Marygreen

(Hardy’s Geography 185); to Jude’s work as a stonemason, which was Hardy’s father’s trade; his work in church restoration, which was an area Hardy himself worked when an architect; and his self-directed studies and longing for a classical university education, the former of which

Hardy undertook, the latter of which he longed for but couldn’t afford due to his working-class roots.292 Indeed, there are so many such details connecting the contents of the book to the life of its author that it is as if knowing he is being read through his novels, through his landscape,

Hardy finally gives his readers the text through which to do so—albeit one that directly challenges their tendency to idealize such a life. In any case, the most significant link between

Hardy and Jude is, to my mind, the fact that Hardy, like Jude, helped to “shore up the walls which exclud[ed] him” for, in his increasingly elaborate construction of Wessex, Hardy effectively built the very prison, or trap, that would bind and determine him.

292 For a more detailed discussion of the personal associations embedded in Jude see chapter 7 in Pite’s Hardy’s Geography, particularly pages 185-6; also see The Life and Work, which explicitly denies these associations but delineates many similarities between Hardy and Jude (particularly in the early chapters which discuss Hardy’s education and self-directed studies). 272

In his extended review of the volume edition of Jude for the Cosmopolis, published in

January 1896, Edmund Gosse inadvertently confirms how bound to—or, in my terms, trapped in—Wessex Hardy had become:

Mr Hardy, as all the world knows, has dedicated his life’s work to the study of the

old province of Wessex….That he is never happy outside its borders is a commonplace; it

is not quite so clearly perceived, perhaps, that he is happiest in the heart of it. When Mr

Hardy writes of South Wessex (Dorsetshire) he seldom goes wrong, this county has been

the theatre for all his most splendid successes. From Abbot’s Cornal to Budmouth Regis,

and wherever the wind blows freshly off Egdon Heath, he is absolute master and king.

But he is not content with such a limited realm; he claims four other counties, and it must

be confessed that his authority weakens as he approaches their confines.

Jude the Obscure is acted in North Wessex (Berkshire) and just across the

frontier, at Christminster (Oxford), which is not in Wessex at all. We want our novelist

back among the rich orchards of the Hintocks, and where the water-lilies impede the

lingering river at Shottsfod Ash… (264-5)

Although Gosse recognizes that Hardy “is not content” in Wessex’s “limited realm,” his dissatisfaction is overwritten by both the fact that his readers “want” him there—that they want him to stay in its most idyllic regions, “among the rich orchards…and… the lingering river”— and the fiction that Hardy himself “is never happy outside [Wessex’s] borders.” In this moment then, we see not the myth of Wessex but the myth of “Thomas Hardy” emerging as he becomes the dedicated “historian of Wessex,” its “master and king,” its “happiest” native, and its perpetual inhabitant.

In effectively losing his “real” identity to the fiction he created, Hardy would become a fiction himself, one which, alongside his work, was placed at the centre of England’s national 273 identity: “No one is more prized as a national English author than Thomas Hardy, “the incomparable chronicler of his Wessex,”” announces Dennis Taylor at the outset of his 2009 essay on Jude the Obscure (“English National Identity” 345). Indeed, while each of the authors discussed in the previous chapters were, during the nineteenth century, embraced variously as chroniclers, defenders, and representatives of England and its national identity, an embrace they themselves sought, it is arguably Hardy who came to stand as “the prime embodiment of

Englishness” in the national imaginary of both the past and present (345). The irony in this fate is rich and certainly would have been (indeed, given the time he would spend honing both his landscape and his life, was) appreciated by Hardy himself as it, perhaps more than anything, proved the very point he had been making his entire career: that England is a nation founded on fiction.

274

Chapter Figures

Figure 4.1: Uncaptioned Frontispiece, Under the Greenwood Tree

Frontispiece illustration (wood engraving) by R. Knight. First published in the illustrated Christmas edition of Under the Greenwood Tree (London: Tinsely Bros., 1875).

275

Figure 4.2: “Thomas Hardy’s Wessex”

Sketch-map by Clive Holland. Published anonymously in the Bookman. (London: October 1891.)

276

Figure 4.3: “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story”

Frontispiece etching to the first edition of The Return of the Native (3 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1878) and the subsequent one-volume edition (Smith, Elder, 1880).

277

Figure 4.4: “The Wessex of the Novels”

Sketch- map published in each volume of the Wessex Novels Edition. (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895/96.)

278

Figure 4.5: “Thomas Hardy’s Wessex”

Sketch-map published in each volume of the Wessex Edition. (London: Macmillan, 1912.)

279

Figure 4.6: “The Mellstock Church of the Story, Drawn on the Spot”

Frontispiece etching by Henry Macbeth-Raeburn. Published in the Wessex Novels Edition of Under the Greenwood Tree. (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895.)

280

Figure 4.7: “Mellstock Church”

Frontispiece photograph by Herman Lea. Published in the Wessex Edition of Under the Greenwood Tree. (London: Macmillan, 1912.)

281

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